2.9 Evaluating Your Search Results

Knowing if you’ve found the right search results is hard unless you know what specifically you’re looking for. This chapter’s purpose is not only to familiarize yourself with the database’s interface, but to evaluate your search results so that you can find the most relevant sources. Evaluating your search results really comes down to what you, as the researcher, are looking for. Are you looking for a research study that relied on specific demographics (like a study about mental health focused on college students), a brief overview of a complex subject (like AI), or older sources to highlight how a topic has changed over the years? These are all options that can be found by evaluating and refining your search results.

The Results Screen

In most databases you search at Steely Library, including the “All Resources” search, the results from your search will appear in the middle of your screen. You will see options to reorder your results by relevance or chronologically. When scrolling through the results, take careful note of the title, availability, and subjects. These three indicators are a great place to start when considering your results.

• Title. After searching, ask yourself “Do the titles match what I’m looking for?”
• Availability. Your timeline for your research will influence whether you need immediate access to sources. Some sources will be immediately available with full-text links, often for pdf documents. However, in some cases the source is not provided and you will see a Request from Interlibrary Loan link below the source.
• Subjects. In most databases, each source in the results list will be tagged with a subject term. These terms are located underneath the title and authors for every source and will tell you the main topics presented in the information. Further, the top subject terms from your results will appear in a filter menu to the left of your results. If your results are not reflecting your need, perhaps the easiest way to fix the error is to adjust search terms, and you can use the filter menu to choose subject terms that are most relevant.

The graphic below highlights the different components you will see when evaluating your search results.

Item Records

Item records are descriptions of individual books, journal articles, and other materials. Important parts of an item record include things like article title, author, and the source name (e.g. journal title). Each of these parts is a field. Some databases label each field; others don’t, assuming that you can infer what each part represents. In the results list, clicking on the title generally brings up a detailed version of the record (the item record) with a lot more information, including additional fields, labels for most of the fields, and often an abstract or link to the full text.