Most of the databases have tools to help you limit your search. In OneSearch and the EBSCO databases for example, you can limit your search by publication date or source type. Instructors frequently require that you use a certain number of peer-reviewed journal articles so you can limit your results to "Peer-reviewed" "Journal Articles" using the Refine my results filters on the left-hand side of the screen. However, you should limit to peer-reviewed articles after you've looked at all the results for keywords and ideas that will help you construct the most effective searches. You can also adjust the publication date to yield more recently published results.
You can use the drop down search fields to narrow your search. For example, the SUBJECT field contains terms that describe the primary topics of the article or book. Do NOT start by limiting your search fields, so you can see all your search results and you can search for keywords in all types of publications. Use the field limiters only if you retrieve too many results that aren't on topic. The Subject or Abstract (summary) fields are useful for narrowing your search.
In the example below, we limited to searching for animal assisted therap* or pet therap* ONLY in the Subject field. to ensure that those terms are important topics in the results. (Remember that Therap* will retrieve therapy, therapist, therapists, therapeutical, therapeutic, therapeutically)
