UK & Ireland Reference Centre: Basic Searching
UK and Ireland Reference Centre opens to a Google-like search box
Enter your search terms and click the search button. To search for a phrase, put quotation marks around it. For example, to search for healthy eating enter "healthy eating". As you start typing, you may see, just like Google again, suggested searches appear below the search box. These may give you some ideas for different searches
Search Options
Also, below the search box, is a link 'Search Options'. Click on this to reveal some options you can use to fine tune your search
These options are:
Search Modes and Expanders
- Boolean/Phrase (default) - supports any Boolean searching or exact phrase searching
- Find all my search terms - A Boolean AND search
- Find any of my search terms - A Boolean OR search
- SmartText Searching - You can copy and paste large chunks of text to search for results and behind the scenes EBSCO will convert your text into what it thinks are the best search terms to use
- Apply related words - Let EBSCO include in your search plurals and what it thinks are synonyms of your search terms
- Also search within the full-text of the article - as it says, search in full-text as well as title, abstract, keywords etc.
- Apply equivalent subjects - Let EBSCO include in your search subject terms that are related to your search terms
Limit Your Results
- Full-Text - limit your results to only those for which the full-text of the article is available
- Peer-Review - limit your results to only those which have been peer-reviewed, so, scholarly material only
- Publication Date - limit your results to those published between certain dates
- Cover story - limit your results to those articles that were featured as cover stories
- Image quick view - limit your results to those articles that have image thumbnails available, and you can further limit by type of image
- References available - limit your results to those articles that list all the sources (references) used and consulted when writing the article
- Publication - search for articles within a specific publication (you will need to manually enter the publication title
- Publication Type - limit your results to those articles from a specified publication type
