For practice exercises, click here.
There are a number of helpful tips and hints you can use to improve your search results. For example, you can use Boolean operators to link terms together; limit the search to a specific title; and /or restrict the search to a particular date range.
Boolean Operators: Sometimes a search can be overly general resulting in too many hits or overly specific resulting in too few hits. To fine tune your search, you can use AND, OR, and NOT operators to link your search words together. These operators will help you narrow or broaden your search to better express the terms you are looking for and to retrieve the exact information you need quickly.
Not - excludes terms so that each search result does not contain any of the terms that follow it. For example, education not technology finds results that contain the term education but not the term technology.
Truncation: Truncation is represented by an asterisk (*). To use truncation, enter the root of a search term and replace the ending with an *. EBSCOhost finds all forms of that word. For example, type comput* to find the words computer or computing.
Note: The Truncation symbol (*) may also be used between words to match any word. For example, a midsummer * dream will return results that contain the exact phrase, a midsummer night's dream
Stopwords are commonly used words such as articles, pronouns, and prepositions. These words are not indexed for searching in the database. For example, 'the', 'for', and 'of' are stopwords. When a stopword is used in a query, any single word or no word is retrieved in place of the stopword. When searching strings that contain stopwords or a Boolean operator, it is necessary to use quotation marks.
Narrow your results: You can narrow by source type, subject, journal, author, and more. This feature, also known as “clustering,” is helpful if you want to discover the major subject groups for your topic without having to browse multiple pages of results, or checking individual articles to see if they are relevant.
The article title link takes you to the citation information and/or the full text. Place your mouse over the Preview icon
Printing: You can print, save or email an article and/or citation. Always use the internal print, email and save buttons; DO NOT use your browser's print function (i.e., do not go to file > print at the top of your screen). You can print, email or save each article separately, or you can add articles to an electronic folder and print, email or save everything at once.
There is a Help link in the upper-right corner of every page with general searching information. Each tab also has a question mark link right beside the search box with more specific information.