HOW TO SEARCH EBSCOHOST DATABASES (PT)

HOW TO SEARCH EBSCOHOST DATABASES (PT) ACCESS TO THE DATABASE There are several ways by which to access EBSCOhost. The two most direct are through an alphabetical list of the databases or through the list of provider/vendors of the NSU databases. Click on one of these access points seen in the picture below. ACCESS BY ALPHABET First, you must enter your name and social security number in the boxes on the gatewaypage that appears when you click on the words Listed Alphabetically. Then, you need to click on the button with the word SUBMIT. 1

A pop-up box appears on the screen. Simply click on the Yes button. The next screen to appear displays the alphabet across the top of the page. Click on the E for EBSCOhost. Clicking on the appropriate letter will take you to the point on the database list where the databases with names beginning with E are displayed. Select EBSCOhost Research Databases, the upper line of the two choices given. You will then find yourself on the first page of the database. 2

ACCESS BY VENDOR/PROVIDER The other route to the database is identical as far as the first two steps shown in the previous section are concerned. You will need to provide your name and social security number on the gateway-page and click yes on the pop-up box. However, instead of seeing the jukebox with the letters of the alphabet on top of the screen, you will find yourself on a page that will show a grid, displayed below, with the names of the providers or vendors who lease the databases to Nova Southeastern University. EBSCO, naturally enough, provides NSU with EBSCOhost. You can see the name on the left panel of the grid. Just click on it to get to the database. You will be brought to the same list you saw following the alphabetical method. After clicking on the appropriate name, EBSCOhost Research Databases, you will be admitted to the database itself. SELECTING DATABASES IN EBSCOHOST EBSCO provides NSU with many databases. Below, you can see the entire list. EBSCOhost Research Databases [International login] AgeLine Alt-Health Watch Biomedical Reference Collection: Comprehensive CancerLit CINAHL - Nursing & Allied Health Cochrane Controlled Trials Register (CCTR) Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effectiveness (DARE) International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA) MEDLINE 3

Nursing & Allied Health Collection: Comprehensive SPORTDiscus You can select one database or many, depending on your needs. For this tutorial we will choose only MEDLINE, because what you learn in regard to MEDLINE, with the exception of limiters (covered later on in this tutorial), applies to all of the other databases, whether you choose to search one or many. To select a database, you simply click in the box to the left of the database name. In the image below, you can see that MEDLINE alone has been chosen for this search session. At this point, you must activate the search process. To do so, you need to click on the Continue button just above or below the list of databases a few of which are shown in the image below. THE SEARCHING PROCESS To begin the search, type into the query box on the top left side of the screen the topic or interrelated topics that you wish to research. You can see in the illustration below that the search demonstrated in this tutorial involves two interrelated topics mass screening and diabetes mellitus. We are interested in articles written about the screening process involved in finding patients with diabetes. Notice the little boxes to the left of the terms entered into the query box. You can see the word and in the two boxes. AND is a Boolean operator built into the search. AND makes it possible to exclude all articles which do not include both topics. In other words, articles about screening in general or screening for persons with other diseases will be automatically excluded in the results of the search. Moreover, any articles about diabetes mellitus without the method of detecting the condition, that is, screening, will also be excluded. 4

Notice that you are in the Advanced Search mode. This is the default mode, and it is preferable to the Basic Search mode, as it has more functionality and greater flexibility. Be aware also of the fields on the right hand side of the query box. What you see above are the Default Fields which generalize the search or expand the number of retrieved articles, a result that is not always helpful if you have too many articles to review. For greater precision and concomitantly greater relevancy in the results, you may change the fields, using one of the following choices. MW Word in Subject Heading MW Virus [Word Indexed] Searches words in MeSH headings; searches both major and minor heading words. May use qualifier words. MH Exact Subject Heading MH Osteoporosis [Phrase Indexed] Searches the exact MESH subject heading; searches both major and minor headings. MJ Word in Major Subject Heading MJ breast neoplasms/genetics [Word Indexed] Searches words in the MESH subject headings. May use qualifiers words. MM Exact Major Subject Heading MM Bone Density [Phrase Indexed] Searches the exact MeSH heading as major concept of the article. 5

To select one of these fields, click on the arrow pointing downward on the right side of the box. Choosing MM Exact Major Subject Heading will give you the greatest relevancy in regard to the search parameters. Below, you can see the fields have been reset to reflect your need for greater precision and relevance. The above search was first done using the default fields. The result was 1395 articles many of which were only tangentially relevant. By using the MM heading, the results narrowed significantly and most if not all of the articles retrieved were more to the point. Next, click on the Search box to the right of the query box to initiate the search process. Below, you can see a part of the results. Notice that 226 articles were retrieved as a result of selecting the MM heading rather than the 1395 that came up when using the default fields. The MM Exact_Major_Subject_Heading is a very good tool to limit the number of retrieved articles. As said before, we will be discussing how to limit articles in other ways a little later on in this tutorial. The retrieved articles are called hits. You can see that there are 226 hits in the list seen below. 6

SELECTING ARTICLES To keep the articles that you choose for your research, click on the folder icon on the right side of the screen. By doing so, the articles that you have selected will be placed in a special folder. Later, after you have gone through the entire list of retrieved articles, or as many of the screens listing them as you wish to see, you can view the contents of the folder and make your final choices. See the arrows in the image above. PRINTING, EMAILING, or SAVING ARTICLES TO DISK The articles that you added to the folder can be viewed by clicking on the folder icon at the top right side of the list of articles. The folder contains the articles that you have selected. You can remove as many of your picks as you want; you can even remove them all and start again. EBSCOhost allows you to print the article citations, email them to yourself or anyone else, and, if you have selected a large number of articles, save them to disk. The options 7

can be seen at the top of the page above. You can print the articles by using either the print function within EBSCOhost or the one provided by your browser. In some few cases, the browser print function may not work. In that case, just switch to the print function in EBSCOhost and the printing process will proceed without a hitch. CHECKING THE LIBRARY S HOLDINGS There are two full-text articles in the file shown above, but we will talk about full-text articles later on. Needless to say, you will not be so fortunate as to get full-text articles in every search and often the most useful of the citations that you find will not be in fulltext. In consequence, we will confine our remarks here to articles with abstracts only. Notice that the last of the articles above displays the words Check Library Catalog under its citation. Clicking on the underlined and bolded words automatically brings you into NovaCat, NSU s online catalog, where you can check to see if the HPD Library carries the journal and if the subscription date precedes your citation date. Sometimes the library holds the journal title for which you are looking, but the subscription date does not reach back far enough in time for you to find the articles. This can happen quite frequently. For example, let us suppose you need an article published in 1998 and the subscription for the journal begins in 2000. The HPD Library has the journal, but it does not have the volume you need. Do not throw up your hands in dismay, because you are not out of luck. In this case, you need to use the HPD Library s Interlibrary Loan Department to obtain the article. The URL for article requests is http://www.nova.edu/cwis/hpdlibrary/articlerequest.html. If you want to find the third article in the retrieved set above, you will notice it was published in the November issue, that is, issue number eleven, of volume 24 which appeared in 2001 in the journal Diabetes Care. By clicking on the words Check Library Catalog, you can determine whether the library has that volume. On the bibliographic record that is displayed in NovaCat, you see that the HPD Library does indeed hold the journal in printed form as well as in its electronic form. Frequently, however, the library will have the printed but not the electronic version. In that case, you will need to ascertain whether the HPD Library holds a subscription to that journal. In order to find out if the library has the journal, you need only to click on the bolded title of the journal. 8

Often, clicking on the title of the journal will show a page on which you can see the beginning date of the subscription. That information is missing on the page displayed above. The third arrow on the right side shows you where the beginning date of the subscription usually appears. To get the missing information, as well as a lot more, you just need to click on the title again; the title of the printed version, not the electronic one. In the illustration below, you can see a much fuller picture of the library s holdings for Diabetes Care. Many of the early volumes of the journal are missing issues, but from 1998 on the library has complete volumes. Because the article you are seeking was published in 2001, you should have no trouble finding the appropriate volume on the shelf. 9

You can also check to see what issues the library has received for the past few years. To find this out, just click on the words Latest Received. See the arrow pointing the right in the illustration above. The HPD Library has received issues of the journal through May of 2003. The article that we checked on, published in November of 2001, is in the HPD Library, and a copy of it can be made on one of the many copying machines the library has for your use. FULL-TEXT ARTICLES Fortunately, two of the three selected articles retrieved in the above search, using the MM fields, produced links to full-text articles, that is, articles in their entirety and not just those provided with an abstract. As you can imagine, this does not happen all that frequently. Most of the time, you will find that articles that you have retrieved have no full-text link. Furthermore, during some searches not too many articles are left over after the limiters have been imposed. If this happens to you, and you cannot get to the HPD Library conveniently to locate articles for which we have the print versions on the shelf, the solution is to go back to your original search and use the default fields rather than the MM fields in order to regenerate the largest number of hits. Most of the time, this latter step will produce full-text articles that can be accessed online. In the illustration below, you can see that two of the articles that we retrieved can be Linked [to] Full-Text. To see and print the articles, you need only to click on the link. 10

Below, you can see the citation and abstract of the article selected and the link to the fulltext. By clicking on the link either at the top of the citation or at the bottom of it, you can access the full-text of the article. Depending on the vendor who provides the full-text articles, there are several ways to get to the actual article some of which are very easy, others a little more complicated. The easiest and most convenient is to be placed right on the desired journal s list of volumes and issues available. Then, all you have to do is click on the appropriate date, volume number, and issue number. In the case of the above vendor, however, a little more work is required of you to get to the article. You must first click on the underlined volume and number of the article in question. Do not click on the journal s title, as that makes the process much more complicated. See the arrow in the image below. 11

You will be taken to a page on which you need to scroll down to find the article. Next, you have to click on the words Open in New Window. The article will then appear on your computer s screen. Below, you can see the top of the paper for which we searched. 12

LIMITERS Other than using the MW, MH, MJ, or MM fields to limit the number of hits generated in your search, EBSCOhost offers another set of filters or limiters. These are located below the query box. To access them, however, you first need to click on the tab with the words Refine Search. Below, you can see the top half of the limiter page. Notice the four limiters selected: date of publication from January of 2000 to April of 2003; Abstract available; English; and journal articles. With these limiters set, you now need to click on the search button once again. 13

The results can be seen in the next illustration. The results are just as good as those achieved by changing the default fields to MM. However, the advantage to using the full panoply of limiters (there are more, as you have seen) is that you can define your parameters more precisely.you can limit the articles to Core Clinical, select Practice Guidelines rather than other types of publications, select languages other than English, and choose from a number of age groups. Be forewarned, however, setting too many limiters will reduce the number of hits substantially, or bring the total to zero. Below, you can see some of the other limiters available to you. 14

BROWSING THE MEDICAL SUBJECT HEADINGS (MeSH) If you are unsure of the terms that you need to use to search the database with precision, you can generate a list of MeSH terms. To get to the list, just click on the MeSH box.. In the query box that appears, type in the term that you wish to check and click on the Browse button. 15

BROWSING AND DOING A NEW SEARCH The list of terms generated can be viewed three different ways: Term Begins With, Term Contains, and Relevancy Ranked. The most useful of these options is the Relevancy Ranked display. Here, below, you can see the result of a search on diabetes mellitus, using Relevancy Ranked. To get further information about the term you entered into the query box, click on that term. What you see below is more than just a list of terms. You can access the National Library of Medicine s hierarchy of terms, called Tree Views, select subheadings, and also view the scope note that gives you a definition of the term. In the illustration below, you can see the hierarchy of medical terms on the left and on the right some of the subheadings, that is, the focus points in the articles on the subject of diabetes mellitus. 16

Below, you can see the rest of the list of subheadings, the scope note and other useful information. In the illustration below, you can see that the subheading Diagnosis has been selected, as was the limiter Major Concept. To launch a new search, you need to click on the Add button; but before you click on the Add button, make sure that the proper Boolean operator is showing. In this new search, AND has been substituted for the default OR. See the horizontal arrow in the image below. 17

At this point, the query box is brought into view with the term you chose entered onto the first line, the subheading next to the term, and the MM field added. To complete the preparations for the new search, you must reenter the second term, mass screening on the same line with the AND operator betweens the terms. Finally, you have to click on the search button once again. In the illustration below, you can see that the results of this search are 209 articles. The process just described is another of the many ways in which you can search the database. 18

REVIEWING YOUR SEARCH HISTORY Another useful tool is the Search History option, the button to which you can see just below the query box. It is the middle tab. Below the tab, you can see the search history with each search given a number beginning with the letter S. Just as with the relevancy ranked approach, you can conduct the search from this vantage point by Adding to the Search. The image below shows how to add to the search. You click in the boxes of the terms that you wish to add and then click on the Add tab. 19

Suppose you want to alter the search a little bit to include diabetes insipidus in the mass screening. First, you click in the box of the term to be added to that box. Change the Boolean to OR. Finally, click on the Add tab. The screen will now reflect the addition of the new term in the search. The next step is to add the term mass screening to the search. Just as before, you click in the box of the term to be added, change the Boolean operator to the appropriate function, in this case AND, and then click on the Add tab. 20

Again the screen changes to reflect the addition of the new term. To complete the search with the new parameters, you need only to click the Search box once again. Below, you can see the results of the new search initiated in the search history function. To be honest, this type of search may be too time consuming to be of any use. However, you now know that you can initiate a search from practically anywhere in the database. 21

THE HELP PAGE Every database on the EBSCOhost list has a help page that can be accessed by clicking on its name. The access point is not obvious and can be overlooked easily. It can be found just above the query box to the left. The first of the help pages for Medline is illustrated below. 22

CHANGING DATABASES WITH THE SAME SEARCH PARAMETERS If you decide to change databases to continue your searching in another database, do not use limiters of any kind in your original database or remove them after you have done your searching. To leave the limiters in makes the process much more complicated and time consuming. This is a serious flaw in the design of the EBSCOhost databases. Let us suppose, however, that you want to try to use limiters. The following message will be superimposed on the search results that you obtained in Medline. Note carefully that limiters from one database cannot all be carried over to another. There is no mechanism by which you can set a limiter in one database and have it apply to the others. Even where the limiter is exactly the same in several databases, it has to be set again in each database selected for a search. To activate the change to other databases, click on the OK button. However, before anything else, you must remove the checkmark from the box for Medline and add checkmarks in the boxes for the new databases. In this case, three databases have been selected: CINAHL, Biomedical 23

Reference Collection: Comprehensive, and the Nursing & Allied Health Collection: Comprehensive. The next step is to click on the Continue button at the bottom of the screen. You will see that you are in the databases that you selected by looking at the Database line at the top of the page, just below the toolbar. To see your former search in Medline, with the original limiters still in place, click on the Search History/Alerts tab. See the arrow pointing down in the illustration above. You will now be able to review your search history. Click in the box to the left of the search parameters and limiters that you used in Medline which have been designated S2 and click on the Add tab. 24

Above, you can see that S2 was selected and added to the query box. Now, you must again click on the Search box to begin the search in the three new databases. The result will be that that search conducted in Medline will be added to the search box for the new databases. Because the three databases selected for the new search do not have exactly the same limiters, those chosen in Medline will be stripped away. Now you click on the Refine Search tab to make sure your search will contain the appropriate limiters for each of the added databases. 25

Scroll down until you find the limiters for the first new database, CINAHL, and check the limiters that you wish to add. In the case of CINAHL, the limiters added were date of publication, 2000-2003; Journal Subset, Expert Peer Reviewed; Publication Type, Journal Article; Language, English; and for Gender, None. Continue to scroll down until you uncover the limiter page for the next database, Biomedical Reference Collection: Comprehensive. Again, you must add the limiters you want to apply for this database. In this particular database, you will notice how different the limiters are from database to database. In fact, only the publication date limiter is the same. It was selected, as were Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals; and for articles with images PDF. Finally, scroll down to the last of the newly added databases, Nursing & Allied Health Collection: Comprehensive. Again, set the limiters appropriate for this database. Here, we selected exactly the same limiters as in the previous database and added an Expander to include a search for the terms in the full-text of articles. 26

Now you need to return to the very top of the page to reveal the search box and click on the Search button again to restart the searching process. The result is a new set of articles for you to use in your research, many of which will differ from the Medline set. SOME MORE ADVANCED SEARCHING TECHNIQUES By this time, you will have noticed that there are only three lines in the query box. What do you do if you have more than three search terms? How do you fit the additional terms into the box? The answer is that you can type more than one term onto a given line in the query box, but you must use the appropriate Boolean operators on each line. Below, we will conduct a search on ankle pain AND mild or moderate. The first term has the AND typed between either the one degree of the sprain or the other placed in parentheses. The next line has the NOT operator to exclude the severe ankle sprain. The last line contains the term therapy. What we have accomplished is to do a search with a five terms made to fit into a limited number of query boxes. The results can be seen in the illustration below. 27

You may find that some of what has been shown in the tutorial to be overcomplicated and far too time-consuming. However, choose those features that you need and ignore the rest. After you have used EBSCOhost databases a few times, you will find them to be very useful in your research, whatever the features you select for your searches. Best of luck. 28