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
A 'did you mean...?' prompt if EBSCO thinks you mistyped or entered a search query similar to others
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
The number of search results
Box 7
Click to select all the items on the results page (see Select Items, below, for the options you have)
You can select
- All items on this page
- Select result 1-50
- Click again to deselect all selected items
Next to this is a tools menu:
- Download the metadata (title, abstract, authors etc) of each selected item
- Save the selected items
- 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
- Cite - create a reference list entry for the item
Box 8
Click to select the individual result
Box 9
An icon that indicates the type of resutl - normally text
Box 10
Indicates what kind of information source the result is - scholarly journal, magazine, book etc., and whether the result is peer-reviewed.
Box 11
Save item (requires a My EBSCO account)
Box 12
Box 13
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 14
Access the full text of the article if it's available
Box 15
The number of times this item has been cited - referenced by other articles. The logic behind showing this is that if you find this interesting or useful and use it in your work you have to reference it. Other people have found it interesting and useful and referenced it, so you might be interested in those articles written by the people who found it interesting and or useful
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 user experience will return results where user and experience 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
There are a lot of filters available and are very powerful, but might be a bit complicated. If you find the options confusing, just stick to the basic search.
- 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
- References available - limit results to articles which have been referenced by other articles
- Comprehension Test available - doesn't do anything
- Image Quick View available - doesn't do anything
- 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: Thesaurus Term: EBSCO use a list of subject terms to describe the content of articles. This list is called a thesaurus. Use this field to search for a specific thesaurus term
- Subject. - more general subject terms, usually supplied by the authors of articles
- Publication - limit to a specific publication
- Publisher - limit to a specific publisher
- Company - limit to results mentioning a specific company
- Language - limit to a specific language
- Geography - limit to a specific country or region
- NACIS/Industry - limit to a specific industry sector
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
7 and 8 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). Project here is a group of saved items in MyEBSCO
- share (the arrow pointing right)
- cite (the quotation marks)
