An example of a proposed innovative and engaging service for students:
Establishing a permanent student pet lounge to help students cope with the stress of academic life.
Identify the main concepts
Please don’t cut and paste your topic directly into the “Find It” box or into another subject-specific database. Instead, identify the main concepts of your proposal or research topic. Look for meaningful nouns that represent your research ideas. This proposal has three: pet lounge, students, and stress.
Think of synonyms that scholars might use to describe these ideas
The words you normally use may not be the ones others have used to describe the same concepts. Think of different ways to express the same idea (more academic language often helps, since this is an academic setting). For example, “therapy dog visit” may have been described as “animal visitation program” in previous works, or presented as a subject term in a database.
| Concept 1 | Concept 2 | Concept 3 |
| Students | stress | Pet lounge |
| college students | anxiety | Pet therapy |
| Learning environment | mental health | Animal visitation program |
Use Advanced Search to capture all concepts
a. Enter a term into the search box below and click/tap “FIND IT”
b. Once you have the list of results, at the top of the screen, click/tap “Advanced Search”
Discover articles, books, videos, images, statistics, and more from the Library's print and online collections
When you have done your search, don’t forget to use the limiters. The main ones are:
| Available in Library Collection.............. | you will be able to read the articles/books online or find them in the library |
| Scholarly Peer Reviewed Journals ..... | if you need journal articles only |
| Print Books........................................ | limits mainly to our physical book, collection |
| Subject ................................................... | a listing of alternative keywords that you can use to improve your search |
| Geography............................................... | want to limit to Canada? use this |
| Limit by Database ................................ | gives you a list of the databases that have been searched (from here you can limit to only one database) |
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There are a small number of databases which are not pre-indexed in the EBSCO's central index, including Canadian Business and Current Affairs, Canadian Newsstand, and CPI-Q. The database names are displayed on the right side of the screen. You may click on the database to view the additional search results. |
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Remember to use this toolbar to easily:
Email yourself the article
Cite your article (provides the citation in many different styles)
Permalink links to the article whether you are on or off campus. Use this link to email to your professor, or classmates. |
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System Requirements
In order to effectively use all EBSCOhost features, the minimum browser requirements are Internet Explorer 7.0, Firefox 8.0, Google Chrome 16, and Safari 5.1 (for Macintosh). You must also have Adobe ® Reader® installed to view the PDF Full Text files. If you are using Visual Search, you must also install Adobe ® Flash Player 8.0 or higher.
Custom made UFV tutorials:
Tutorials from the service provider:
c. You should now see three search boxes where you can enter your key concepts, separated by the “AND” operator:
d. Enter separate concept terms in each box, then click/tap the green Search button on the right
e. You should now have your list of results
Check the Peer Reviewed box on the left (under “Limit To”) to narrow your search to scholarly articles.
To understand how these concepts have been described by scholars, open a relevant article and look for the subject headings under the Subject field. You can redo your search using these subject terms to find more relevant articles on your chosen topic.
Quotation marks: Notice that both “pet therapy” and “animal visitation program” are in quotation marks. This forces the database to search for articles where the words in the given phrase appear in that exact order.
AND: When using Advanced Search, the database allows you to incorporate multiple search terms. The terms are connected by the AND operator within a drop-down menu. Using AND tells the database to only retrieve contents that incorporate all the ideas entered.
OR: Use OR between terms when there are multiple ways of expressing the same concept. You can also use OR to incorporate concepts that are different, but still within the same scope as your topic; for example, “architectural design” OR “urban design.” In the screen capture above, OR is connecting the two similar search terms: “pet therapy” and “animal visitation program.”
NOT: This tells the database to ignore (i.e. not retrieve) results that contain certain key terms often associated with similar concepts; for example, salsa NOT dancing, or “postpartum disorder” NOT depression. In the image below, NOT has been selected in the drop-down menu:
