Vocational Studies Complete: Basic Searching
Vocational Studies Complete opens to a Google-like search box
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. You don't have to use them, but might be worth trying if you get too many results
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 (Q. What does "apply equivalent subject terms" mean on a search results page?)
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 in magazines
- 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
Full-Text is an important limiter 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-Review box to make sure that all your results come from scholarly information sources.
