Vocational & Career Collection

Advanced Search features allow you to use Boolean operators to adjust your search settings.

Boolean searching allows you to include or exclude specific terms from your search to help you more easily locate materials. This is done by using the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT. These dropdowns are available at the top of your search results. A brief explanation of each Boolean operator:

• AND – Pulls resources where all of your search terms appear. AND makes your search smaller.
• OR – Pulls resources where one or the other or both of your search terms appear. Using OR makes your search larger.
• NOT – Excludes a word from your search. Using NOT makes your search smaller.

Using a series of dropdown menus, you can also select which specific fields of an item’s record that you want to search, such as title or author.

"Vocational & Career Collection" Advanced Search Page

Below the Boolean operators and search bars, there are several search options that can expand or limit your search.  You can fill in or check off any of these options for your search.

Search Modes and Expanders

• Phrase (default)
• Find all my search terms
• Find any of my search terms
• SmartText Searching - Lets you type in as much text as you want to conduct a search.  This is useful for searching for paragraphs of text or an entire page.
• Apply related words
• Also search within the full text of articles
• Apply equivalent subjects (default)

Limit Your Results

• Full text
• Publication type
• Number of pages
• Peer reviewed
• Publication
• Published date
• Cover story
• PDF full text

If you want to see your past searches, click on the "search history" icon below the search bar on the database's home page.  The link is also available on the advanced search page.  The search history function displays past searches and includes the keywords, filters, and search options that you used.  There are three actions you can apply to your search history:

• Rerun - Conducts the search again with the same keywords, search modes, and filters.
• View details - Tells you the platform you used for the search (EBSCOhost Research Databases), the search screen you used (Basic or advanced), and the database(s) you searched.
• Edit - Lets you revise the search as you would on the basic or advanced search screens.  When you hit "save," it will conduct the search and display your results below the search history list.

"Vocational & Career Collection" Search History Page