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Using the Library's Databases

Searching EBSCO Databases

When you enter an EBSCO database, you'll automatically be in the Advanced Search area where you have multiple fields to enter search terms:

You can begin entering your search terms in the search boxes available.

This example will use the phrase "social media." You can see that there are quotation marks ( " ) around this phrase, and this is to ensure that these words are searched in this exact order; if there weren't quotation marks around this phrase, the database would look for any appearance of these words, not necessarily in this exact order.

You will also want to make use of the options in the Select a Field drop-down menu. There are many more options than in the screenshot below, so be sure to explore!

This example will use the TX All Text option, which will search for "social media" in multiple areas in a record: the title, summary, abstract, subject headings, and the full text (if available). This option casts a wide net, so it is a good place to start your search! Let's click Search and see what happens.

screenshot showing search screen in Academic Search Complete with the phrase "social media" highlighted, the "select a field" dropdown highlighted, the "All Text" option in that dropdown highlighted

This search retrieves over 2,400,000 results! This is far too many to browse through, so we want to find a way to focus our search to look for articles that are most relevant.

You may want to take note of the Subjects that appear under the titles of articles; subjects are labels that describe or pinpoint what an item is most about, so if you see your search terms in the subjects, you'll know that an article is more about those concepts than if they just appear in the title, summary, or somewhere in the body of the article.

In our example, "social media" does not appear as a subject in the first article, so it likely won't be the most relevant option available. Let's scroll back up to the top and select SU Subjects in the drop-down to search for our phrase in only the subjects of articles.

You can see that we've changed the drop-down menu to SU Subjects and, after clicking Search, this drops our results to just over 188,000; still too many to browse through, but more manageable than millions of results!

Most likely, you'll want to add an additional search term to your search, to help focus your research question. Let's say that in this example, we're interested in the effects of misinformation that is spread through social media platforms. In the second search box, we'll add an additional term (misinformation) to our search, and search for it in the TX All Text field.

You can see that this drops our results to 8,000. Let's take a look at the All Filters menu under the search bar to see if we can refine our results further.

There are a number of ways to limit our results in the All Filters section.

Your instructor may require that you only reference peer reviewed sources; in this case, you can select the Peer Reviewed filter. Your instructor may also require recent sources (e.g., from within the last 10 years), so you can enter a date range in the Publication Date filter:

You may want to limit your results to just those languages you read:

When I added the 3 filters from the last step, I reduced my results to a more manageable 4,000.

Let's click on one of the titles to go into the record to see some of the additional tools available in EBSCO databases.

Here is a zoomed in view of an EBSCO article. Let's take a closer look at the icons on the top right, which direct you to many useful features.

To view the full text of an article, click the Download button.

If you don't want to read the article right away, use the Share option to create a stable link to the article or send it to yourself or someone else via email.

Click the bookmark icon to save the paper to your MyEBSCO account. If you want to organize your account, use the Add to project option to create folders for your articles. For example, I added this article to my "Theology paper" project folder.

Use the Cite option to generate a citation for the article in a variety of citation styles that you can copy and paste into your bibliography (don't forget to review for accuracy).

EBSCO Text-to-Speech Feature

Conduct your search as shown in the steps above. When you are looking at your results, look for the Online Full Text option. This tells you that there is a Text-to-Speech option for the article: 

When you click the Online Full Text button, it will take you to the article page. Now, click on the headphone symbol and click the play button, and the text will play out loud. Happy listening!

A helpful feature in this right-side menu is the "download mp3 file" option, which allows you to save the recording and listen to it on a personal device or while offline.