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Focus search results with filters on the NHS Knowledge & Library Hub

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 Search the NHS Knowledge & Library Hub to find healthcare information from a wide range of NHS-based sources. Your results may include thousands of items. Focus your search results to make it easier to find what you need.

There are a number of filters you can use:

  • Publication Date
  • Source Type
  • Subject
  • Publication
  • Publisher
  • Language
  • Databases

screen-shot of the list of filter options

The screen-shots below are taken from a search. The hit counts and elements available will vary depending on your results. Note that each filter you apply builds on the previous selection, so you should see your number of results decreasing with each selection.

Publication Date

Use this filter to focus on the latest information or a specific date range.

screen-shot of date options; range or within 1-5 years

Source Type

This filter allows you to select particular type of information source, for example books etc. For articles select the option academic journals. Click the Show More link to see all the source types available for this search. You can order the list either by Name (of source type) or hit count. Hit count is the number of results for this source type. You can select more than one option.

example where I have selected the source type academic journals

Subject

Use the Subject filter to focus on a particular main subject area for the information you are looking for. Again the Show More link will give you all the subject areas found and you can re-order this list to make it easier to find the subject you are looking for.

example of subjects presented for my search

View Your Filter options

Some of your filter options are listed at the top of the results page. You can de-select individual filters listed or clear them all.

example showing the filters from above that I have selected

Advanced Filters

There are a number of other filters which may only be useful if you are confident in what you are looking for. These are:

  • Publication
  • Publisher
  • Language
  • Databases

Publication

Publication refers to a particular title, such as a book title or journal title. This is useful if you are looking for a particular reference.

example of the publications found for this search

Publisher

Only use the publisher filter if you are confident of what you are looking for. Selecting this will limit your search considerably and introduce bias. It is also worth noting that publications can change publisher and some platforms host a number of different publishers. So it is difficult to know what information you are excluding.

example of the publishers available for this search

Language

It can be useful to limit your results by language, to the languages you can understand. Likewise, if you know that something is in a particular language, particularly if non-english, this will focus your results considerably.

example of the languages of the sources returned in my search

Databases

The databases option is another filter that you should be cautious about using, depending on the type of search you are conducting. It can be good to focus on databases you are confident will be more specific to your subject, for example mental health databases. However, if you conducting a wide ranging search you need to ensure that your search covers more resources.

Example of the databases covering the topic I have searched for

Get Access

NHS staff can use the NHS Knowledge & Library Hub; log in with your NHS OpenAthens username.

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