Greek320: Homer: Databases: Specifically, JSTOR

Suppose your professor gives you an assignment to research literature in ancient Greece. Your first step is to determine your KEY TERMS. In this case they are LITERATURE and ANCIENT GREECE. 

If you perform a search for LITERATURE you would retrieve over 2 million results as seen below. This is way more than you could reasonably evaluate and chances are most of the results will not be on your topic. 

Use AND to narrow your results. This time search GREECE AND ANCIENT GREECE. Notice your results have dropped to 55, 796, but we can still do better. 

Let's put "ancient Greece" in quotes - this will search it as a phrase, rather than looking for any entry that has "ancient" and "Greece" in it. Now we're down to about 18k results.

You can refine your result even further by using the ADVANCED SEARCH option in the top toolbar..

From here you can choose to NARROW your search by ITEM TYPE such as articles or books. You can also enter a DATE RANGE to find only results in a particular time period. 

You can also NARROW your search to items in a particular DISCIPLINE. To do so click the check box next to the DISCIPLINE you are interested in.

After NARROWING the search to  articles written in the last five years from the Classical Studies collection we are now down to 122 results.