Too many titles in your result list? Try some of these solutions:

1. Replace a general search term with a more specific one:

2. Add more search terms to your search query:

dating and college students
becomes
dating and college students and grades

Browse through the titles and subjects of your current search results and look for other useful search terms.

3. Put phrases in quotes. Some databases automatically read adjacent words as phrases but others do not. Most databases read words within quotes as a phrase. For example, if you are looking for articles on educational technology, using the search query

"educational technology"

will find retrieve the useful article "Educational Technology Fills the Gap" but not the irrelevant title "Educational Testing: an Outmoded Technology".

4. Use limit options if the database has them. For example, can you limit by date, language or format (such as a book, journal article, etc).

5. Add a proximity operator to specify how closely two terms appear. For example the search query:

election w/4 reform

tells the computer to retrieve items where the word 'election' appears within 4 words of the word 'reform'.

Different databases have different ways of writing a proximity search. Check the help screen for your database.

6. Use the boolean operator "not" to eliminate an unwanted term. If you were looking for articles about the movie "Truman", but didn't want to find articles on the author Truman Capote, this search query would solve the problem:

truman not capote