Catalogs & Databases: Home

Hello, and welcome to the tutorial for searching in an EBSCOhost database. This tutorial is meant for beginners and will cover simple search strategies and methods. Let's begin.

Find the EBSCOhost database link on the library's catalogs and databases page. From the main EBSCO home page, you can choose to search a single database by clicking on the title of that particular database or you can select more than one or even all of the available databases to search simultaneously. Each database has a description where you can get an idea of what subjects they cover.

The general topic databases include Academic Search Complete, the e-book collection, Funk and Wagnall’s New World Encyclopedia, MasterFILE Premier, Newspaper Source, TOPICsearch.

For this tutorial, we will select Academic Search Complete. That takes us to the advanced search page where we have three search boxes readily available. We also have drop down boxes for Boolean Operators and drop down boxes to select a field of metadata to search. Metadata is the backend information by which the sources in databases and catalogs are organized and able to be searched by such as author name, title, subject, and language.

A Boolean Operator is a term such as AND, OR, and NOT which connect search terms to create specific search queries. For example, searching for climate change AND coastal erosion will return results which contain both terms in the metadata. Meanwhile, searching climate change NOT coastal erosion will exclude any results on climate change which contain coastal erosion in the metadata. Searching using the OR operator will return results which contain either search term used such as climate change OR coastal erosion. This will return results which contain either term whether they contain both or not.

Searching using the field options allows for you to search for a term in a specific field. For example, searching for climate change in the title field will return results with climate change explicitly in the title.

From the Advanced Search page there are additional options for searching your database. We can choose from the beginning of our search to limit to full-text, scholarly or peer-reviewed journals, references available, publication, document type, language, page range, PDF availability, image options, and whether or not a cover story is present.

Let's perform a search using some of these options.

On the advanced search page, using our search query climate change OR coastal erosion, select full-text, peer-reviewed and let's limit our publication range to between 2010 and 2017. Select that we only want to view articles with lengths greater than 5 pages. Let's see what that returns.

As you can see from the left side of the screen we view our search results with several limits already in place. We are able to refine our results to even greater specificity using additional limiters or even remove the limiters we've previously selected such as our length requirement. That expands our results. Selecting more limiters will usually reduce that number of returned results. For example, if we select to expand our subject options you can see that the number of search results each limit would result in is substantially lower.

Looking at the search results you are provided with the title, publication information, subject terms, source type, and document type, whether it is PDF or HTML. Scrolling over the little document and magnifying glass will give you a preview of the record. This includes the abstract of the source allowing you to get more of an idea of what the source is about and whether it is useful for further reading.

Clicking on the source title will open the detailed record and the link to the text, if the full text is available. Clicking on any of the hyperlinked text in the detailed record will open a new search using that term. For example, clicking on the author's name will perform a search in the author field for that particular author in the database or databases you have selected.

The available tools on the right side of the screen allow you to save the source record, copy a persistent link to the record, print, email, or export the citation, and it also provides a citation generator where you can copy your preferred citation style.

Those are the basics of searching an EBSCOhost database.

Thank you for viewing this video and please leave any comments or suggestions for other video tutorials for your research needs.

Thank you!

Gale's family of in-context knowledge portals is an engaging online experience for those seeking contextual information on the most significant topics, people, and events.

All of Gale’s In-Context resources work the same. On the homepage of every In-Context resource you'll find featured topics providing a snapshot of selected topics with links to more information, featured video, and featured news providing access to articles from publications selected by your library or school.

Click on a link to read the article.

Click the publication name to see all articles in that publication.

In addition, you'll find topics organized by category. Click view all to see all topics in that category or click the Browse topics tab to see a complete list of categories and topics. Click on a topic to view the topic page.

Topic pages, also called portal pages, provide you with a portal for accessing documents and multimedia on a topic. On each topic page you'll find a topic overview, viewpoint articles, including featured viewpoints selected by editors, full-text newspapers, magazines, and academic journal articles, reference materials, statistics, images, video, audio, and links to vetted websites.

You can search for topics by using the search box found in the resource banner.

Notice that as you enter a term topics are suggested. Topic pages appear in italics. From the resource banner you can access the advanced search feature to perform more complex searches. For example, if you want to find documents on a particular topic that are also about a particular place. Or use the bookmark feature to copy and paste or email a bookmark for a page.

Select more from the resource banner for additional tools including your highlights and notes. Your My Folder where you'll find items you save. Your search history. Or access to the Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.