There are a few ways to try to narrow your search results to a particular country or geographic region in the Library's NavigatorSearch (formerly Roadrunner). However, none of these are typically very effective, as detailed below. When using these strategies, you run the risk of eliminating important research articles from your results.
Therefore, the Library typically recommends excluding any geographic terms or limiters from your search strategy, and instead just concentrating on your topic keywords. You will be able to overlook articles from other countries if they are not applicable to your research. However, you may wish to try using some of the below techniques.
- After you have conducted a keyword search in NavigatorSearch, you may use the Geography limiter on the lower left-hand side of the screen. Click on Geography to display the top six countries or regions, and then click Show More to see all available options, as shown below.
- Limitations: It is important to keep in mind that not all articles have an assigned geographic descriptor. Selecting this limit may actually eliminate valuable search results that do, in fact, come from your country of interest.
- Limitations: It is important to keep in mind that not all articles have an assigned geographic descriptor. Selecting this limit may actually eliminate valuable search results that do, in fact, come from your country of interest.
- A second technique that you can try is by including the country or geographic terms as part of your search string, as the in example below.
- Limitations: please keep in mind that many articles from the United States, for example, may not necessarily include the term "United States" in the text; instead, they may mention a specific state, city, university, etc. Again, by including the geographic terms, you run the risk of eliminating important research articles from your results.
- Limitations: please keep in mind that many articles from the United States, for example, may not necessarily include the term "United States" in the text; instead, they may mention a specific state, city, university, etc. Again, by including the geographic terms, you run the risk of eliminating important research articles from your results.
- If you keep seeing search results from specific countries or regions that you do not want to include, you can try using the Boolean operator NOT to eliminate these terms. For example, if you are not interested in articles where the research was conducted in China, you can try adding China to your search connected by NOT, as shown below. Ho
- Limitations: as with the other techniques, this may eliminate valuable research from your search results. Using this technique would eliminate any article that just mentions the word China in any context.
- Limitations: as with the other techniques, this may eliminate valuable research from your search results. Using this technique would eliminate any article that just mentions the word China in any context.
