LibGuides: Search Help: Common Search Problems: My results are too old

Intro

If you're finding results that are too old to be useful, try the following:

Use a date filter
Use the older results to find newer articles using the citation mining search technique

Use the Date Filter

If the search results you are finding are too old, filter your results by date. Almost every search engine has a function on the search results page which will let you limit your search results to a certain time period. This will narrow your search results by eliminating those records that don't meet your date criteria.

ISU Library databases have a date slider on the left side of the search results page that looks like this:

Image showing the date slider in the CINAHL filter menu.

You can click and drag the slider bar to change the date range, or type the start and end years into the boxes above the slider bar.

Citation Mining: Use Old Stuff to Find New Stuff

Highly relevant old stuff can still benefit your search! Paste the title of the old article into Google Scholar. Once you find the record in Scholar, look for the small "Cited by" link at the bottom of the record. Clicking it will show you more recent papers that cite back to your older paper in their references list.

A Google Scholar result with the "Cited By" area highlighted.

Pro tip: When viewing the "forward" citations for your article, there may be too many to look through. The good news is, you can run a search within these articles! Check the "Search within citing articles" box to run a keyword search within the forward citations.

In the screenshot above, the "search within citing articles" box is checked, and the query "speech output technologies" has been searched, showing 181 results out of the 286 we started with.