EBSCO Database Guide

Once you Search, the screen should have a similar layout to the image below.

If you want to change how your list of results are sorted, click on Relevance and select your desired sorting method.

If you still wish to narrow or broaden your search, click All Filters. 

Once in the All Filters tab, you can add or remove different filters to best fit your desired search. 

When you are ready, click Apply Filters and it perform the newly filtered search.

Here are some of the advanced search operators and techniques we use:

​​​​​​Basic Boolean Operators: There are three primary Boolean operators: AND, OR, and NOT.

• AND: Use "AND" to narrow down your search. It retrieves results that include both of the specified terms. For example, "cats AND dogs" will only return results that mention both cats and dogs.

• OR: Use "OR" to broaden your search. It retrieves results that include either of the specified terms. For example, "cats OR dogs" will return results that mention either cats or dogs.

• NOT: Use "NOT" to exclude specific terms from your search. For example, "cats NOT dogs" will return results that mention cats but exclude any mention of dogs.

Parentheses: You can use parentheses to group related terms and control the order of operations. For example, "(cats OR dogs) AND (pet care)" will retrieve results that mention either cats or dogs in the context of pet care.

Truncation: You can use symbols like '*' (asterisk) or '?' (question mark) to search for variations of a word. For example,  "?child" will retrieve results containing words like child, children, childhood, etc.

Wildcards: You can also use symbols like '?' (question mark) to replace single letters within a word or '#' (pound/hashtag) where words might contain an extra character. For example, "recogni?e" will return results for both the American "recognize" and the British "recognise", while "labo#r" will return results for both "labor" and "labour".

Quotation Marks: Use double quotation marks to search for exact phrases. For example, searching "climate change" will retrieve results that include the exact phrase "climate change" with both words together, rather than only the ones that include the words "climate" and "change" separately. 

Field Searching: In EBSCO databases, you can specify which fields to search in, such as title, author, or abstract. For example, you can use "TI" for title and "AU" for author. For instance, "TI(climate change) AND AU(Smith)" will search for articles with "climate change" in the title and authored by someone with the last name "Smith."