Library Guides: Web of Science Help Guide: Refine Searches

How do I improve search results?

Look for misspellings in your strategy.
Use proximity operators (instead of quotes) to search for phrases that may be stated in multiple ways.
Decrease the number of concepts searched.
Try broader search terms.
Use the Related Records feature when you find a relevant article.
Remove terms that are unlikely to be used by an author.
Replace terms that are too general or too specific.
Increase the number of synonyms or alternatives for a term.
Use truncation and a wildcard symbol to pick up word variants.
Try a different database.

Choose the most specific or most significant key words.
Search for phrases using quotes to find the exact phrase.
Increase the number of search concepts that are ANDed together (learn more about Boolean operators).
Use fewer synonyms for terms.
Limit to Review Articles under Document Types.
Limit your search to type of article, language, current years, etc.
Ask for significant words to be in the Title of the article rather than using the default All Fields or selecting Topic (which searches for your keyword in the title, abstract, author keywords, and Keywords Plus).

Preprints on Web of Science
Discover preprints for key research articles ahead of the formal publication in a journal from a range of international selected and evaluated preprint repositories in the sciences, social sciences, and arts & humanities.
Grants Index
Search for your topic to view which grants funded research on similar topics.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global on Web of Science
"Enables researchers to seamlessly uncover early career, post-graduate research in the form of more than 5.5 million dissertations and theses from over 4,100 institutions from more than 60 countries, alongside journal articles, conference proceedings, research data, books, preprints and patents." (Source)
Korean Journal Databases on Web of Science
Provides access to articles from multidisciplinary journals covered in KCI. KCI is managed by the National Research Foundation of Korea and contains bibliographic information for scholarly literature published in Korea. Search in Korean or English.
SciELO Citation Index on Web of Science
Provides scholarly literature in sciences, social sciences, and arts & humanities published in leading open access journals from Latin America, Portugal, Spain, and South Africa. Search in Spanish, Portuguese, or English.
MEDLINE on Web of Science
The U.S. National Library of Medicine's (NLM's) premier life sciences database. Due to the functionality of automatic term mapping, including MeSH terms, most librarians recommend searching MEDLINE via PubMed.