Library Search Options

Sometimes even searches that use really specific keywords retrieve a lot of results, but you can use different search options to narrow or reorder your results list. 

Filters

• Availability– This gives you easy access to several popular filters such as Available online and Peer-reviewed Journals. So if you need to find articles from peer-reviewed journals for your paper and need to get to the full text as quickly as possible, look for these two filters. If you’re not exactly sure what peer-reviewed means, learn about the Peer Review Process Links to an external site. by watching a 3-minute video by NCSU.
• Resource Type – You can use this filter to find a particular type of resource such as articles, books, videos, scores, or images.
• Date – You can use this filter to limit your results to items published within a certain time frame. 
• Topic– Assigning topics to items makes those on a similar topic more findable. You’ll see terms that relate specifically to the search you’re conducting. These can be used as alternate keywords if the terms you originally selected aren’t as effective as you thought they’d be.
• Language – This filter lets you limit to the language of the publication.
• Library Location – This filter lets you limit results to what’s available at a specific library location. For example, you may only want to see books that you can find and check out at Miramar College.

Viewing & Applying Filters

Clicking on Show More beneath any of these filters will pull up the complete list of options available. Click on Apply Filters after you have checked off your options. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Personalizing Your Search

If you would like to focus your results in a specific discipline, you can use the Personalize feature. You can select up to 5 preferred disciplines that will show up higher in your results page.