Using Limiters
Channel: Amelia Gayle Gorgas
Date: 2014-01-17

This video carries the creative commons license: Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND ) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/)

Ever wish you could cut out those sources that were published too early, or perhaps are not scholarly enough? Or maybe you are only looking for newspaper articles from a certain country! Watch this video to learn to use the limiters in Scout in order to eliminate results that don't fit within your search parameters.

Transcript- Using Limiters
Created: January 2014

Hi. I am Elizabeth, and I am going to show you how to use limiters. By the end of this tutorial you will be able to use limiters to narrow your search results to find exactly what you need. 

Using SCOUT can bring you thousands of results of all different types-news articles, academic journals, e-books, physical books, statistics, and photographs. With all these results, sifting through all of the records can be overwhelming.

To help narrow down the results to exactly what you want, you can use limiters. Limiters are filters that narrow the search.

Starting from the SCOUT advanced search page, let’s search for zombies AND “popular culture.”

This search results in thousands of possibilities. We could sift through all of the results or we could use the boxes on the left side of the results page to filter out what we don’t need. 

There are several categories to refine your results. A common one is the scholarly (peer reviewed) journals limiter that filters out everything except academic journals.  

Peer reviewed articles are authored by experts in their respective fields, and the articles have been approved by other experts as high-quality research. Some professors request that you use academic journals in your research.

To display only these types of journal articles, just click the box called scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals. Using this limiter will display only journal articles that match this criteria. If academic journals are not what you need, just click the X to close the limiter. Then, scroll down to the source type box, and choose your resource this way. For example, if you only want to find news and magazine articles, choose the appropriate boxes and then click update. 

There are several other sets of limiters that you can use including geography, language, publication date, and subject. Using limiters can save you time and narrow your research so that you can find the resources you need with just a few clicks.

Thanks for watching this video. If you have any questions about limiters or research, visit us at lib.ua.edu or stop by the library.