So you've done a search with keywords connected with Boolean operators, perhaps limited your results or tried some advanced search techniques, and the database has given you a list of search results. What do you do now?
The five tabs at the top of this page will help you with the following topics:
So you've done a search with keywords connected with Boolean operators, perhaps limited your results or tried some advanced search techniques, and the database has given you a list of search results. What do you do now?
The first thing to pay attention to is how many results your search returned. You can find it at the top of the results list. Anything more than 1000 results might be a signal that you need to refine your search some more.
You can narrow down search results by adding keywords, setting limiters like Scholarly Journals or Publication Date, or using the advanced search to set even more refined limits.
Notice that search results are sorted by relevance: the articles the database believes are most relevant to your search terms are at the top of the list. If the date of your article is important to you, you can have the database sort your results by listing the newest articles first, or the oldest articles first. I've always wanted to see what they wrote about Ebola in 1995, haven't you?
One of the most important thing to keep in mind when you get a list of search results is that results are sorted by relevance, not by date.
This is similar to Google search results - Google sorts results by relevance, popularity, and who has paid to get their site to the top of search results.
So why does this matter? You can still find good articles, that are just as fresh and new further down your results list. Just because the Artificial Intelligence bot running the database doesn't see them as relevant to your search doesn't mean they won't seem relevant to you, the researcher.
So, don't stop at page one of Search Results, there may be something good on the next page.
It is possible to get the number of search results down to a manageable number, so that you can sort through all of them.
A "manageable" number of results will be different for everyone, but no more than 1000 results is a good number - you'll have a lot of choices, but it won't take too long to go through your results, reading titles and abstracts and setting aside articles that might work for you.
You don't have to sort your results by relevance, though. You can change the "Relevance" menu and sort your results differently:
"Date Newest" will put the newest articles at the top of the list, this is the most common way of sorting articles.
"Date Oldest" will put the oldest results at the top of the list, with results getting more recent as you go through the list.
Many people are more comfortable when results are sorted by "Relevance," which is closest to the way Google sorts results. In practice, the relevance sort is not entirely accurate, so librarians recommend sorting by date to see the most recent research published on a topic first.
So you searched the database, and ended up with a list of search results. Will every single source in that list be appropriate for your research? Probably not: just because a search result contains your keywords, doesn't automatically mean it'll be relevant to your topic. Scroll down for tips on evaluating search results.
You do NOT need to read every source in the list!
Use the article's title and subject terms to determine if it's worth your time reading.
Let's say you're writing a paper on the effects watching television has on children, and you want to see if there is any connection to obesity. You might search with television and children and obes* (we're using truncation to get back results with both the words "obese" and "obesity").
To begin, skim your results list and pay attention to the article title and subjects:
You can tell just by looking at the article titles that these are not relevant: they deal with adolescents in other countries, Iran and China.
Here's another one you could skip:
I can tell from the title that the article is about a heart attack someone experienced, so already it's looking pretty off-topic. But when I look at the information underneath, I can also see that this is an article from People magazine about Rosie O'Donnell: definitely not related to my research topic.
But this result looks like it might be relevant to your search topic:
The title identifies a possible effect of having a television in the bedroom has on children has on their weight. and the Subject terms mention television and children, and childhood obesity specifically. I can also see that this source was published in an academic journal So it's a good bet that this article could have relevant information for your research. Click on Access Now (PDF) to open the article.
Abstracts are short summaries or descriptions of the article's contents. Reading an abstract can be a good way to tell quickly whether or not the article is relevant to your topic.
To read an abstract from your search results, click on Show More just above the subject terms and below the title of the article.
In the abstract above, the biggest clue that this article might be useful to support a link between television and obesity is the sentences, "Children with a TV in their bedroom had a higher BMI and were significantly more likely to be overweight compared to those without a TV in their bedroom."
If you want to argue that watching lots of television contributes to a poor diet, click on the Full Text link and read the article! If you don't see a Full Text, either limit your search to Full Text and look for a different article, or contact a librarian for interlibrary loan options.
So you've sorted through your results list to find an article with an abstract that looks relevant to your research, and you've read the Full Text of the article. But hang on!
There are some other things you'll want to pay attention to, as well, including:
Currency: The article should be considered up-to-date, depending on the field. Health Sciences and Technology articles should be very recent (less than 3-5 years old). Articles of Literary Criticism, however, don't really go out of date. You can find the published date of an article right in your results list:
Authority: The author and publication should have appropriate credentials (experience, position, education, reputation) to report authoritatively on a topic. The author's credentials usually appear on the first page of the article:
You can find out more about a publication by clicking on the Source name from the article detail page:
Once you click on the Source name, the Publication Detail page can tell you more about a source. If it is a peer-reviewed academic journal, it can be considered a very authoritative source:
Bias: The author, publication, and publisher should present information objectively, and without bias of any kind. Information presented with personal beliefs, emotion, or opinion, especially political in nature, should not be considered objective.
Most scholarly peer-reviewed journals make it a priority to publish scientific research objectively and without bias, but magazines and newspapers may have a specific editorial slant that may affect what is published there. You may not find explicit bias in the description of the article or publication, so you'll need to use critical reading skills to analyze the author's writing for evidence of bias.
Bias is not necessarily a bad thing, but if present, it's crucial that you are aware of it and interpret the information accordingly.
If you ever are in doubt about a source's credibility, contact a librarian.
When you search the databases, you can set conditions on the search results you get back, including their length, publication date, format, and so much more.
We call these conditions "limiters," and by setting limiters before you enter your search terms and hit 'Search,' you can save yourself a lot of time sorting through articles that don't fit your requirements.
The Advanced Search screen has more limiters than a Basic Search. To get to there, click on the Advanced Search link under the search box:
Scroll down for an explanation of each limiter you'll find on the Advanced Search screen in Academic Search Complete.
1. Limiting to Full Text is discussed under the Full Text tab above.
2. References Available allows you to limit your search to articles that contain searchable cited references.
3. Limiting to Scholarly/Peer Reviewed is discussed under the Scholarly/Peer Reviewed tab above.
4. Publication date: Use this option to search for articles within a specified date range. Click the radio button next to your choice to activate.
5. Publication, Publication Type and Document Type: These limiters allow you to search a particular publication, a particular type of publication (journal, magazine, newspaper, conference paper, blog post), or a particular type of document (case study, book chapter, interview, book review).
6. Language: This limiter allows you to search for articles written in a specific language. Language choices range from Afrikaans to Urdu.
7. Number of Pages: This limiter allows you to specify how many pages you'd like the articles in your search results to be. You can specify the exact number of pages (equal to), or you can specify that your article be longer (greater than) or shorter (less than) a certain number of pages. You might use this option if your instructor asks you to use articles longer than 5 pages (greater than 5), or if you want to avoid the articles in the database that are less than one page (greater than 1).
8. Cover Story: Click to limit results to articles that were featured as cover stories.
9. PDF Full Text: Click to limit results to articles that are available in PDF format.
10. Search Modes: Search modes offer four different ways to conduct a search. You can combine a search mode with expanders, such as “Apply related words,” and filters such as “Full Text” or “Publication Type.”
Search modes:
Proximity – Searches for terms in proximity to one another. For example, the search web accessibility gets searched as web N5 accessibility, which means “web” and “accessibility” separated by five words or less, in any order. A record will be returned only if all the words searched are found within the same field, such as title, subject, or abstract. There is no proximity across fields or subfields. This mode also supports Boolean searching when explicit Boolean operators are included between terms.
Find all my search terms – Automatically searches with Boolean “AND” between all search terms, for example, the search web accessibility gets searched as web AND accessibility.
Find any of my search terms – Automatically searches with Boolean “OR” between all search terms, for example, the search web accessibility gets searched as web OR accessibility.
SmartText Searching - You can copy and paste large chunks of text into the search box, for example a paragraph or a page. SmartText Searching technology reduces the text entered to the most important search terms based on term frequency (TF) and inverse document frequency (IDF) calculations of the terms in the query and the databases searched and then creates a weighted Boolean query for search execution.
11. Search Expanders: Expanders let you broaden the scope of your search. They do this by widening your search to include words related to your keywords or including the actual text of the full text results in your search.
Common expanders that can appear below the Refine Search sub-tab include:
Apply related words - Select this option to expand results to include true synonyms and plurals of your terms.
Example: A search for Neoplasm with the Apply Related Words expander applied would also search for Tumor, Tumour, Tumors, Tumor's, Tumours, and Tumour's.
Also search within the full text of the articles - Select this option to search for your keywords within the full text of articles, as well as abstract and citation information. This applies only to words not qualified by a field code.
Apply equivalent subjects - Select this option to utilize mapped vocabulary terms to add precision to unqualified keyword searches.
12. Publications Search: A publication search is one that gives you access to all available volumes and issues of a selected publication.
EBSCO maintains a Comprehensive Subject Index (CSI) of subject terms, which are applied to all articles indexed by EBSCO.
EBSCO's CSI is an expansion and adaptation of the Library of Congress Subject Headings database. As Library of Congress Subject Headings are created to cover the books received by that library, they describe broad subjects that have been considered at book level. To cover periodical content at an appropriate level of detail, and to cover subjects that may not yet have appeared in books, EBSCO creates additional subject headings that do not appear in the Library of Congress file. A professional team of taxonomists reviews the latest literature, subject-specific glossaries, current events, and other resources to ensure that subject headings are available to cover the wide span of content indexed by EBSCO.
EBSCO’s subject headings are also continuously reviewed to ensure that they follow current usage. Subject headings attempt to convey concepts in natural language wherever possible, with exceptions to prevent ambiguity.
Following Library of Congress practice, EBSCO indexers can expand on headings by applying subdivisions that refer to specific aspects of the topic. Subdivisions are taken from an approved list. For example, the CSI includes the root heading “Newspapers.” When appropriate, we expand on that heading by adding subdivisions to create new headings such as: “Newspapers – Awards,” “Newspapers – Reviews,” or “Newspapers – Taxation.” Thus, more specific headings can be systematically created to completely represent specific content.
Headings for personal names, organizations, and places are created by indexers as they are needed according to standard formats based on the practices of the Library of Congress and the Anglo-American cataloging rules. Headings created by A&I are reviewed weekly by members of the taxonomy team to ensure consistency and avoid duplication of headings.
The databases make it easy to work with articles in a variety of ways. To find your options, click on any of the three tool palettes attached to your article:
The three most common tasks users undertake once they have located the article they need.
https://www.sanjac.edu/library| Central Library: 281-476-1850 | Generation Park Campus: 281-998-6350 x8133 | North Library: 281-459-7116 | South Library: 281-998-6350 ext. 3306