Filtering your results means limiting the search based on certain criteria. The two that you'll want to pay the most attention to are publication date and source type.
Let's do a new search to find information about watching movies as a form of coping with depression. This was the subject of the essay “Harvey” from the book The Anthropocene Reviewed. The author was suffering from depression, and his boss recommended watching the 1950s film Harvey to help give him a more positive outlook on life. But have there been any actual studies done on whether or not watching movies can really help with depression? Let’s focus our search on comedy films.
I'll type in "Watching comedies" in quotation marks, AND "depression”.
The left side of your search results is where you can apply filters. If you limit it to "peer reviewed" by clicking on that check box, it's mostly only going to show you articles from scholarly journals. More on that in a minute.
Let's skip "source type" for right now and go down to "publication date." You can easily filter it so that you're only retrieving articles in your search results from the last 12 months, the last 5 years, the last 10 years, or you can input a custom date range. If your topic is about technology for example, you'd probably want to be looking at more recent articles from the last 5 years, since technology changes quickly.
Okay. I'm going to click "clear all filters" and then we'll look at source type.
Before we do that, make sure you set your limit back to "full text."
In most of the library's databases, including ProQuest, everything is sorted by relevance, meaning it shows at the top of your list the article that it thinks is the most useful one. But sometimes you're going to want to find scholarly information -- which is basically studies, experiments, and research. And sometimes you'll want basic information that's written for the general public -- which is usually found in magazines and newspapers. So you can filter out which source type you want, on the left. If you want to look at scholarly information, you can limit it to "peer reviewed," which is another term for scholarly information. ‘Peer reviewed’ just means that other scholars review it for validity before it is published. You can also just click "scholarly journals" under "source type." Now everything in your results is a scholarly journal article.
So what exactly is a scholarly journal article? Usually it's an actual study, or scientific experiment, that's been done on an issue. So here's an example of an experiment done on dialysis patients who spent their time watching movies while receiving treatment.
Let's click on this one: "Movie Watching During Dialysis sessions reduces depression and anxiety and improves quality of life: A randomized clinical trial."
I'm going to click on "Full text PDF" and we'll get the actual image. This is what the article looks like in the print publication. It was published in the scholarly journal called Complementary Therapies in Medicine.
So, we'll look at the title first and see if that gives us a clue as to what they studied. It looks like they studied how watching movies during dialysis treatment reduced patients’ anxiety and depression. Just about all scholarly journal articles have an abstract at the top. An abstract is a summary of the article. The summary of the article shows how they conducted the study and what the results were.
They conducted their study by using two different groups of patients: a control group, which didn’t get to watch movies while receiving dialysis treatment, and an experimental group, which did get to watch movies while receiving dialysis treatment. The patients who watched movies while receiving their treatment experienced less depression, less anxiety, lower hypertension, and fewer headaches than the patients who didn’t get to watch movies while receiving their treatment. They concluded that watching movies is a good stress reliever while undergoing this type of treatment.
One thing to point out about scholarly articles is that they are sometimes limited. They often do provide scientific evidence in a lot of cases like in this article -- which was an actual experiment done to determine if watching movies could help with patients undergoing dialysis treatment. But this study only focused on dialysis patients. What about other types of patients in the hospital? Or people outside the hospital? Also, we’re not entirely sure what types of movies were shown. Were the movies ones that they knew the patients would enjoy watching? Were the movies randomly chosen? This study, also, does not attribute any cause. It doesn't talk about why movies might help with depression, because it doesn’t focus on movie selection as part of the experiment. So scholarly articles are sometimes very focused on determining certain facts, and that's sometimes it.
If we go back to our search results, let's see if we can find an article that puts movie watching into better context. For that, we'll look for a popular article -- something from a magazine or newspaper that is written to inform the public. Let's get rid of the filter for "scholarly journals" over on the left. And make sure you turn off "peer reviewed." Now we'll click the filter for "newspapers" under "source type." Since news is constantly updated, you'll see a lot of examples of how movie watching can improve mental health.
Let's take a look at this article from a newspaper from Cape Town, South Africa: "Crime: 10 ways to improve your mental health."
This article is talking about the crime rate in South Africa and how it is causing a lot of anxiety in people. It suggests different ways on how to protect yourself and take care of your mental wellness. One of the suggestions is to turn off the news and social media and to choose more uplifting content, such as reading or watching movies. This causes a person not to be so stressed out all the time.
So the scholarly article showed us an experiment that was conducted to show that watching movies can improve the mental health of dialysis patients, and this newspaper article gives us a broader context that shows us an example of what people can do to cope during troubling times.
Don't forget that once you find an article, you'll need to locate the MLA citation so you can cite your sources. From the article, click on "Cite" at the top right.
The box that pops up defaults to an MLA 9th Edition citation. Copy and paste this into your Works Cited page.
So to summarize, ProQuest is a tricky database to use, but with some search strategies and using the filters, you'll have better luck finding what you need.
Now, you'll get a chance to practice finding articles about how college students are finding ways to relieve stress and anxiety in their lives.