Here we just specify one matching field (sport) but you can add more criteria, specify regular expression criteria, or remove the conditions altogether to return all athletes. var Athlete = mongoose.model('Athlete', yourSchema); // find all athletes who play tennis, selecting the 'name' and 'age' fields Athlete.find({'sport': 'Tennis'}, 'name age', function (err, athletes) {if (err) return handleError(err); // 'athletes' contains the list of athletes that match the criteria.}) If you specify a callback, as shown above, the query will execute immediately.