Advanced Searching Techniques

Each item in a library has a record of information that contains things like the author, the title, a publisher, and other important details that help users find relevant resources. A basic search will typically use a keyword search, where the search system will look for your search system in the entire record of an item. Field searching (sometimes referred to as index searching) allows you to be more specific in your search. With a field search, you can limit your search to a specific field of an item's record, rather than the entire record. There are many different types of fields, but some common options are:

• Title: Only brings back results if the words you searched for are in the title of the work
• Author: Looks for your keywords in the author field, which can include not only writers but also composers, directors, producers, translators, editors, and more.
• Subject: Library items have associated subjects assigned to them to make them easy to classify and find. Searching in the subject field will bring back items that have subjects that match your keywords. This can be a good way to get relevant results even if your search terms are not mentioned in the title. Be aware that subject terms must be exact and different databases will have different preferences for how to refer to different subjects. Check out the Subject Terms Page on this guide for more information
• Abstract: Searches through an abstract to find your search terms

The exact method of adjusting the fields you want to search in will vary slightly between databases, but they will often follow very similar steps. The example below details how to use the field search on PsycINFO. The steps will be similar on other databases or search systems that offer field searching. 

1. Click on "advanced search" to be taken to the advanced search page. This link will often appear underneath or around the search bar, or sometimes located in a header menu. In the case of PsycINFO, the advanced search link is located underneath the basic search box.
2. Click on the drop down menu under "select a field". This will open a dropdown menu with all available filters listed.
3. Select a particular field to search in. In this example, we can see there are quite a few options. Some good options will be "Title", "Author", "Abstract", or "Subjects". If I wanted to find sources that mention the term "Anxiety" but I only want to it bring back results that mention "anxiety" in the abstract, I can select the "Abstract" field. 
4. When you select a particular field, the database will only search in that field. For example in the above example will only return results where "Anxiety" is in the abstract. This can be helpful since "anxiety" could be mentioned in several places in a full-text search, even though it may not necessarily be relevant. An abstract provides an overview of an article, so results that frequently mention it in the abstract have a high chance of being relevant to my search.