Ovid MEDLINE Search Instructions

Step Six - Limiting Your Results

What if you were only interested in retrieving articles on your topic written in English, or articles written in the past two or three years?

There are two menus available for selecting limits. One menu is located just below the search text box on the main search screen. Listed here are the most common limits that people employ in their searches. (The screen image from Step One shows where these limits are located on the main search screen.) To use these limits, simply click on the box or boxes that you want to use to limit your search, and hit the "Perform Search" button. The database will apply these limits to your current search or, if you do not have a search entered in the search box, the database will apply limits to the last search set in your search history.

An even larger menu of limits is displayed when you select the target icon at the top of the main search screen. Limits available here include language choices, age group choices, publication types, etc. If you are interested in finding only articles relevant to evidence-based medicine, you should use publication type limits such as practice guidelines, randomized controlled clinical trials, consensus development conference, meta-analysis, etc. To select more than one item on a limit menu, hold down the "Control" key on your keyboard while making your selections. Once you have made your selections, click on the "Limit Search" button.

EXAMPLE - Selecting limits from the limit screen

When you select the target icon from the main search screen, the next screen shows your search history and a variety of limit options.