Refining a Search

Introduction

You can narrow your initial result set by using the Refine Your Search box that appears on the left-hand side of the screen. Refine Your Search lets you narrow your results by:

  • Author
  • Format
  • Year
  • Content (content type, such as Fiction, Biography, Thesis)
  • Audience
  • Language
  • Topic (subject matter, such as Music, Philosophy & Religion, Chemistry)

This information is automatically extracted from each record in your result set, and the first five values are automatically displayed in the box. If there are more than five values, a Show more... link lets you see the rest.

    Example: Searching goethe:

    Initial display After selecting
    Show more...


The number of items for each value is listed in parentheses. The example search above has retrieved 1,184 items with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as author.

Display items.  To display the list of items for an individual value.

Action

Select a entry (author name, format type, date, etc.).

Result: The Search Results screen displays the reduced result set.

 

Note: If you have more than one specific piece of information to use in your search, you may produce a smaller results set more quickly by using an Advanced Search.

 

Refining further ("drill down")

You can further narrow your results by selecting an additional value from a different category in the Refine Your Search box. In the example above:

  1. Selecting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reduces the result set to 1,184 items for which he is shown as the author.
  2. Selecting German reduces the result set to 764 German language items.
  3. Selecting Books reduces the result set to 748 German lanuguage books for which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is shown as the author.

You can select from a category only once; for example, once you select a specific language (German), the Language category no longer appears in the box.

Backtracking

Each time you select a value from the Refine Your Search box, the resulting Search Results screen adds that value to the Search results for... statement at the top of the screen. Each value (other than the current value) is a link that takes you back to that search level. You can climb back up toward your original result set by clicking on these links at the top of your results (or your browser's Back button).

You can select any link at any time. You do not have to backtrack in order.

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