Sometimes keyword searching doesn't retrieve enough relevant sources. Instead, try searching with the subject (headings), or controlled vocabulary, of the database. Review your result list of books or articles. When you find a good relevant one, look for subject headings to quickly lead you to more relevant articles on your topic.
For example, the article below was one of the results for the keyword search on "faculty development." By checking the Subjects, you can see the term this database uses is "teacher development."
To find out what other subjects are related or similar, and therefore can be searched with an OR between the subjects, go to the database's thesaurus. The link to the thesaurus is usually located at the top of the screen (EBSCOhost), or within the Advanced Search option (ProQuest).
Following our example above, searching "faculty development" leads to "teacher development," and from that subject we can see there are other related subjects:
Ask a librarian if you have trouble finding the subject headings.
Citation chaining is the process of looking at the sources cited by a selected article's author(s), but also looking for sources which used that article as a cited source.
To look back at previously used sources:
To look forward in time for newer sources:
Too many results? Look at the limiters in the database -- usually in the left column -- for a way to reduce the number of results to more relevant sources. Here are few limiters that you might find useful: