Your goal is to scan some abstracts, read 2-3 articles, and then move on. What do you do, then, if your keyword search turns up 10,000 search results? If you just need a few good articles, one strategy is to take advantage of sorting and relevance ranking features – to try to move “good” articles closer to the top of the list. A challenge is that each database defines “good” (relevance) differently, and none of them can read your mind (yet).
The UW Health Sciences Library has put togethera summary of sorting and relevance ranking features for PubMed, Google Scholar, and Web of Science, followed by a search example showing how they compare.