EBSCOHOST DATABASES. Business Source Premier provides articles from over 2500 journals, magazines and newspapers on business and management topics.

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1 HOW TO USE THE DATABASES EBSCOHOST DATABASES Read How to devise a search strategy before using this guide. Ebscohost is a package of several databases. The two below are the most relevant for most assignments at EAHM, but it is a good policy to search across all the databases as described below. Hospitality & Tourism Complete covers scholarly research and industry news relating to all areas of hospitality and tourism. This collection contains full text for more than 500 publications, including periodicals, company & country reports, and books. Many citations are provided without full text. Use these to find the full text articles in other databases or ask a librarian to get them on interlibrary loan for you. Business Source Premier provides articles from over 2500 journals, magazines and newspapers on business and management topics. KEYWORD SEARCH Access Ebscohost databases from Athens and log in using the logins you have been allocated. When you first log in you will see the Chose databases page. Click on the Select all box (so your searches scan all the databases in one transaction, saving you time), and press Enter. 1

2 The Advanced search screen will display when you log in. It is easier to formulate a complex search using this screen. Use the Help feature at the far left on the information bar, to discover the search tricks supported by this database, to make your search as effective and efficient as possible. From the advanced search screen, enter your concepts in the search slots, being careful to use one line for each separate concept. Use search tricks like truncation symbols, quotation marks around phrases, and Boolean operators, for a more efficient search. 2

3 Narrowing the search To retrieve the most relevant results, open the pull-down menu beside each search slot and highlight Title. That way, your search terms have to appear in the title of any article that is retrieved. If you don t make this change, articles will be retrieved that contain your search terms in their full text, and this often means they are not focused on your topic. You can further narrow your search by using the filtering mechanisms below the search slots. Under Search options / Search modes, leave Boolean / Phrase ticked (this is the default). Click on the box beside Scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals if you want to exclude magazine and newspaper articles, and retrieve only scholarly articles. Click on the box beside Full text if you do not want to see citations for articles without full text in this database. If you are doing an extensive search for a major assignment, it is inadvisable to exclude articles without full text. Although you may not find the article in the Ebscohost databases, the citation may help you find it in another database. If you can t find it in any of the Academy s databases, ask a librarian to find it for you. If you want only recent articles, or an article from a particular time period, fill in the slots beside Published Date. Usually it is best not to select the other options until you have done a search to see what is available. Click on Search to conduct your search. 3

4 If you get a screen like the one below, first check your spelling / typing. If all is correct, then your search is too narrow for this database. Go to the search slots at the top of the screen and adjust your search. Start by changing the Title limiter from the drop-down menus beside each search slot, back to the default Select a Field (optional). Or remove hotel*, to see if there are articles on employee motivation in other types of workplaces. If you do get results, the display will look like the screen below. At the head of the list of results, you will see the total number of results retrieved (in the case to the right: 4 results). Under that, each result will be listed. If you did not click on the peer-reviewed journals box on the previous page, you may still do so here, by clicking on the box in the right-hand column, and then clicking on Update results. 4

5 Scan the results to find the most relevant for your purpose. Look at number 29 in the image below. The blue underlined part is the title of the article. Under article title is the author or authors. Note that authors names are always written in inverted order in Ebscohost, so you do not have to invert them to create APA references. Right after the authors names is the title of the journal, magazine or newspaper. Next you will find the date of publication, and volume and issue numbers, followed by the page range. Finally you will see the DOI number, if there is one. Ignore the rest of the information when creating APA references. Under the bibliographic information about the article you will see different links. If you see only links saying Add to folder, or Cited references, or Times cited in the database (see numbers 26, 27 and 28 above), then the full text is not available for this item. Make a note of the details so you can look it up in other databases, or give it to a librarian to procure by interlibrary loan. The other links are HTML full text and PDF full text. (See number 29 above). HTML full text means that it is in webpage format. Always prefer PDF format if it is available, because this will give you a full scanned version of the original print document, including page numbers. Page numbers are important for APA in-text references. To see the full text, click on HTML full text or PDF full text. To see the Abstract only, click on the blue underlined title or the Abstract link. 5

6 To print the article, click on the printer icon at the top left. To a copy to someone, click on (middle top). Save a copy to your P drive by clicking the save icon second from the top left. Click on Citation (above the print icon, top left) to generate an APA reference for this article. Beware: although this feature will produce a reference in APA style, the references thus created will contain errors. You must know the rules in order to check these machine-generated references. Click the Add to folder (middle top) icon if you want to save the document in a temporary folder, to later with others all at once. Note that the citations only stay in the folder until you log out of Ebscohost. 6

7 PUBLICATION SEARCH Ebscohost databases can also be used as if their periodicals were on a library shelf. You can browse a range of issues for one title, or find a specific issue. Click on the Publications link on the information bar along the top of the page. You will see two search slots on the Publications screen. In the lower search slot, type the title of the periodical you are seeking, e.g. Journal of strategic management; or type a key word strategic. You can also click on the letter representing the first word of the title, to browse the list of periodicals starting with that letter. If you type a keyword in the upper search slot, you will retrieve a list of articles in all publications, so avoid the upper slot if you are searching for a particular journal. The results will show you whether the full text is available, and exactly what years are covered. For example, in the screen shot above, the Journal of Business Communication is available in full text from September 1, 1963, to the present. However, for the Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning, there is no full text, only citations (author, title, etc. data) from 2007 to the present. 7

8 Click on the journal title to find links to each issue, and click on the issue you want (e.g. Vol.46, Iss.3 July 2009) to see all the articles in that issue. 8