Articles from scholarly journals, magazines and newspapers covering every area of academic study and news.
Searches across all ProQuest databases. Articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers covering every subject area and news topics.
In this video, we will explore the advanced search strategies available in the EBSCOhost database. We will be using techniques explained in a previous video about the basic search strategies. If you haven’t watched that video or feel confused in the first few minutes of this video, follow the link to watch part one. Your professor expects you to use 5 scholarly sources from the library databases, all published within the past 5 years. To get started, type your search term, “climate change” (in quotes) in the search box. Press enter or click search to see your results. These limiters usually reduce your results quite a bit; however, you may want to refine your search terms to find articles that are more on target with your topic. There are several ways to experiment with your search terms. One of the simplest is to do what we did at the beginning of this search and put your search terms in quotes. This tells the database you are looking for these words together. Another way to make your search results even more relevant, is to investigate the vocabulary the database uses to tag your topic. This particular topic has gone through some name changes over the years, so you may hear people refer to it as “global warming” or “climatic changes.” In order to determine the vocabulary the database uses, expand the section labeled “Subject:Major Heading”. As you can see here, there are several terms listed that can be used to explore your topic further. You can click on the “Show More” link to expand this section. The pop up window offers you an idea of the vocabulary this database uses, and helps you brainstorm ways in which you can narrow your search. For example, if we select “Public Health,” the search will be narrowed to articles focusing on the correlation between climate change and public health. Now you need to look at the articles in your results list. Remember the preview tool from our Basic Search Video? Reading the title and abstract will help you decide if you want to read the whole article. Does this article contain the information you need? If so, click on the title. This opens a screen that gives additional information about the article, including subject tags that you can use for additional searches. This is the best time to get your citation information. However, don’t assume citation generators are completely accurate. Make sure to check the citations using the HACC Citing Sources LibGuide. You may also want to email, save, or print your article as you gather your research to keep yourself organized. Finally, You’ll see some of the article records have red Find It! buttons. The Find It button tells you the full text of the article is not available in EBSCO, but may be found in a different HACC database, like ProQuest, ScienceDirect, or elsewhere. So make sure to check out the Find It buttons on those articles that meet your needs. If you would like more information on how to effectively search, check out our other videos or ask a librarian for help.
