Tip #3: Search Modes in EBSCO CINAHL
Depending on how an institution has adjusted their EBSCO database admin-level settings, the default search behavior may not work as expected. In this example, I'm highlighting CINAHL's Search Modes. You can adjust the Search Mode from the Advanced Search screen, toggling between "Boolean/Phrase" / "Find all my search terms" / "Find any of my search terms" / " SmartText Searching." My institution has "Boolean/Phrase" set as the default Search Mode.
This setting impacts the search results in a significant way, especially for novice users that may be less likely to add Boolean to a single search line.
Here you can see a simple three-word search S1 (ginger pregnancy nausea) run in the "Boolean/Phrase" mode only returns 23 results. Most users would assume that the database would automatically AND the individual terms together, but in the "Boolean/Phrase" mode, this is not the case. For running multi-concept searches in a single line while in "Boolean/Phrase" mode, make sure to add the Boolean operators between your terms. The revised search S2 (ginger AND pregnancy AND nausea) returns the results that the S1 search was attempting to find. Users can also adjust the Search Mode to "Find all my search terms" which will automatically AND all individual terms and will return the same set of results as S2 - see the S3 example below.
question for you, Kate: do you all have "Apply equivalent subjects" checked or un-checked by default? I personally like to be able to select my own thesaurus terms because i'm a control freak but i imagine there are pros and cons to each.
ReplyDeleteUnchecked for the same exact reason!
DeleteThanks for this! The difference is quite dramatic. But now I'm confused--does anyone know what "Boolean/phrase" actually means? It doesn't seem to be searching strings of words in a single box as phrases....
ReplyDeleteAccording to the EBSCO documentation:
Delete"1. Boolean/Phrase – Supports any Boolean searching or exact phrase searching. Stop words are ignored when part of phrases being searched.
2. Find all of my search terms – Auto AND all search terms entered (e.g. web AND accessibility)
3. Find any of my search terms – Auto OR all search terms entered (e.g. web OR accessibility)"
It supports the use of Boolean, but only IF you use it. I noticed that many of my novice undergrads don't tend to use Boolean and dump multiple concepts into the single line. You get some relevant results, but not all.
In the Boolean/Phrase mode, there is some adjustable (at the admin-level) proximity distance that can be set, so for my S1 example, it kind of ANDs the terms together, but it also applies some not-obvious adjacency limit to it.
I believe the default proxmity in EBSCOhost databases is 'N(ear)5', that is terms up to 5 words away in any direction (ignoring stopwords). You can test what your particular EBSCO administrator has set by performing the search with N5 between words and comparing it to the results when nothing is between words in your keyword search.
DeleteThanks, Wade! You are correct! I was able to get the admin log in from a colleague to check under the hood. I appears to be set to 5 as the default, but it can be adjusted in the settings.
Delete