guided search

A Guided Search Through EBSCOhost

Guided Search Exercise: This exercise is meant to introduce you to the features and search possibilities. Have fun exploring!We are searching for a consumer reports article on coffee makers. Start at our home page.Go to the home page www.hcpl.netClick the Databases tab

From the dropdown menu click Databases

Databases included on our website are grouped by subject or if you click on the alphabet below they will appear in alphabetical order by the name of the database.

Click on Magazines & Journals

Click on EBSCOhost

Note: When a patron clicks on EBSCOhost from home before access is granted the patron must type in a valid Library card number.

Tip: Here you do have the option to click both Academic Search Complete and MasterFILE Premier. Searching both of two large databases at the same time can slow down the computer considerably, with a quick enough internet connection it can be worth it to conduct searches from both resources at the same time

For this exercise select the Academic Search Complete checkbox for this search.Then Click the Continue button.

Lets start building our search by choosing the Publication “Consumer Reports”.Click on “Publications” from the top blue bar.

Now there are two search boxes. ESCOhost has a second browsing box open to searchonly the publications.

Type into the Browsing Academic Search Complete – Publications bar:“consumer reports” then click on browse

Select the first two check boxesClick the Add button.

This will add the exact format of the terms that will communicate to the database to retrieve articles only published by Consumer Reports or Consumer Reports Buying Guide

Now click the Search button

All kinds of Consumer Reports articles come up in your search results. At the time this training was written 9449 results showed up. Databases are updated and added to throughout the year. Some databases are updated and expanded more often than others.

Now we are going to look for our coffee makers.Click on the Subject Terms in the top blue bar, next to Publications

Here a second search box appears. You can now search the index of the database and see exactly what subjects are listed. Type in this box coffee makers. Then click the browse button.

A message appears from the database guiding us in our search. Here the database tells us that the phrase coffee maker is not one that is searchable through the indexes, however it does recommend the phrase that the database does recognize as “COFFEE-Equipment & supplies” as the best fit for the same concept. Lets use it. Click on this suggested term.

Select the Checkbox of COFFEE – Equipment & supplies then Click the ADD button to add it to have EBSCO format the search terms and input them into your search box.

Click Search.

Now we have all kinds of search results that talk about coffee making equipment. Lets combine our searches to focus on coffee making equipment articles by consumer reports.

Click on Search History under the search bar.

Here is a history of the searches we have executed during this session in EBSCOhost. We can combine searches to create new results that focus on both articles published by Consumer Reports and that have the Subject of coffee makers. S1 and S2 refer to Set 1 and Set 2 of searches.

Select S1 and S2. Click on the “Search with AND” button to focus our search

EBSCOhost has pulled up 34 results to meet our criteria.

Browse the results and find the Top coffee makers for December 2011.Click on the title.

Click on the left hand side PDF Full Text icon.

Now proceed to question 1.