Oh, The Research You Can Do With EBSCOhost!

You probably have a favorite EBSCOhost database where you go day-in and day-out for your research needs, but you may not know about all the great features provided in that database.

Rice Library’s latest LibGuide, EBSCOhost Databases, unveils all the ways to take advantage of EBSCOhost’s resources though a series of online tutorials and an in-depth factsheet. Some of the features discussed in this LibGuide include:

Personal Accounts: Create your own account to save searches and results, create customized folders, and share resources with other account users.

Controlled Vocabulary: Discover the search terms unique to each database for subject searching.

Limiters/Expanders: Learn about all the many methods to narrow or broaden searches.

Cited References: Find out just how much influence an author or article has had in their field.

Alerts: Produce reminders for the latest issues of your favorite journals and rerun searches for long-term research.

Once you learn about all these features, you’ll never know how you did research without them!

A Database Feature That Deserves a Hearing

Producers of subscription databases are constantly looking for ways to improve their products to make them easier to use and more functional for users. EBSCOhost, which produces a number of databases to which Rice Library subscribes (Academic Search Premier, CINAHL with Full Text, Historical Abstracts, etc.), has recently added a “Text-to-Speech” feature which reads the text of HTML content contained in the database.

Users that retrieve full-text HTML documents (not .pdf) in an EBSCOhost database may listen to the text read by one of three English language accents (American, British, or Australian) and at one of three speeds (slow, medium, or fast). Look for the “Listen” icon (pictured at right), located in the upper left hand corner of the full-text portion of the document. Select from the accent and speed options and click on the “Listen” button. The user may select specific text or have the document read from the beginning. As an added feature, the portion being read is highlighted, making it easier to follow along.