Say you want to find the poem The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. You first decide to start with a basic search for raven and narrow it down to Poems.

You get to the results page and found out there are over 1500 results! YIKES! You could go ahead and View all POEM Matches and hope that it comes up somewhere near the top. But what if it doesn't? Do you really want to search through 1500+ results for one poem? I know I wouldn't!

So what can you do? Let's try doing an advanced search instead. Under Literature enter/select the following information and then hit the orange Go button.

Keyword: Raven
Author: Poe
Type: Poems

Success! The results page this time around is much better! Only four results and two of them are full text! 

 After looking at both full text links, you will find they are basically the same. The only difference is the first one contains additional information like explanation and source list, which may be useful if you are doing a paper.