Timeliness
Questions to ask about books:
Ask questions like those raised about reference works. Library catalog search results are ranked by relevance. You can choose to sort them by date so that recently published works will be at the top of the result list. You can then look at older items as you scroll down the list.
Questions to ask about articles in magazines, journals or newspapers:
Magazine, journal and newspaper article citations may be ranked by relevance. You can, if you need to (e.g., you've been asked to find articles that were published in the last five years), sort results into reverse chronological order so that the most recently published articles will be at the top of the list and you will be going back in time as you scroll down.
Sometimes you may want to limit your search to older articles to get a snapshot of an event that occurred in the past. For instance, you might be more interested in articles about September 11, 2001 that were published in 2001-2002 than in more recent ones. You can usually apply date range limits so that results match the years you want to cover.