The search results page contains a lot of information, let's break that down.
Each numbered box with a red outline contains different information. Let's go through them in order:
Box 1
The various limiters (here called filters) that you can use (some limiters might be more useful than others!): to limit and filter search results. Technically, limiters limit searches before you search and filters are used to reduce the number of results after you search, but everyone uses the terms interchangeably:
- All Filters - click this to open other filters (see below)
- Full Text - limit to results where the full-text of the article is present. In the image above, the Full Text filter has been selected
- Peer Reviewed - limit your results to only those which have been peer-reviewed, so, scholarly material only. In the image above, the Peer Reviewed has been selected
- All time - limit results by time period
- Source Types - search only specific information source types e.g., books, magazines, trade publications, academic journals.
Box 2
Click here to go to the Advanced Search.
Box 3
The number of search results and box to tick to select all items on the page (see Select Items, below).
Box 4
Display options:
- Show - number of results displayed on a page (10 [default], 20, 30 or 50)
- Sort by:
- Relevance (what EBSCO thinks are the best results fitting your query)
- Newest results first
- Oldest results first.
Box 5
Click here to either:
- Save search
- Create an alert to be emailed when new results matching your search query appear
- Note: you need a My EBSCO account to save searches and create alerts.
Box 6
Click to select the item (see Select Items, below).
Box 7
Indicates that the result is text-based.
Box 8
Indicates what kind of information source the result is - scholarly journal, magazine, book etc., and whether the result is peer-reviewed.
Box 9
Save item (requires a My EBSCO account).
Box 10
Tools menu:
- Cite - create a reference list entry for the item
- Project - save the item EBSCO's equivalent of Zotero or Mendeley (requires a My EBSCO account)
- Share the item to:
- Google Drive
- One Drive
- Create a permanent link to the item
- Email the item.
Box 11
The item detail. Click on the title to see the full item record
- Show more will expand the abstract (if there is one)
- Below the abstract are subject terms - you may need to click on "+... more" to see them all.
Box 12
Access the full text of the article if it's available.
All Filters
Clicking on All Filters in 1. above will open a box with many filtering options:
Search Mode: proximity: Searches for terms that are near each other. For example, the search poor communications will return results where poor and communications are separated by five words or fewer, in any order.
Apply equivalent subjects: Let EBSCO include in your search subject terms that are related to your search terms.
Filters
- Full Text - limit your results to only those for which the full text of the article is available
- Peer Reviewed - limit your results to only those which have been peer-reviewed, so, scholarly material only
- Cover story - limit results to articles that were featured as cover stories.
- Publication Date - limit your results to those published between certain dates:
- All time
- Past 12 months
- Past 5 years
- Past 10 years
- Custom range
- Databases - choose different EBSCO database that the library has access to
- Source types - limit to specific type of information source (books, magazines, trade publications etc)
- Subject. - more general subject terms, usually supplied by the authors of articles
- Lexile Range - search for results by the level of their reading complexity (the higher the score, the more complex the item)
- Publication - limit to a specific publication
- Publisher - limit to a specific publisher
- Language - limit to a specific language
Full Text is an important filter because if you don't use it, you'll see lots of results where there's just the detail page with title and abstract only. If you want to read the whole of an article that's one of your search results, tick the Full Text box to ensure that all results have the full text available.
If you are looking for scholarly/academic sources (and this may be specified in your coursework/assignment instructions), tick the Peer Reviewed box to make sure that all your results come from scholarly information sources.
Select Items
3 and 6 above mention selecting items. When you select items, a variety of options appear:
These are
- download (the arrow pointing downward) - download the item
- save item(s)(as item 9 in the first image on this page)
- save item to project (the white plus in the black folder)
- share (the arrow pointing right)
- cite (the quotation marks).
There are a lot of search options which are very powerful, but might be a bit complicated. If you find the options confusing, just stick to the basic search.
