English for Academic Purposes (EAP): Find Database Articles

Suppose you are searching on the topic in EBSCO: Impact of video games for university students.

1. Enter key concepts or keywords, combine with operator "AND". EBSCO will prompt automatically some synonyms combined with "OR" in the drop-down list for you to choose;

2. Select a field as you like, the fields of TX, AU, TI, SU, AB(from the drop-down fields) are often used;

• Phrase searching "" - enclose a search term in double quotation marks ("...") to make sure it is searched as a phrase
   
• Truncation * - stands for any number of characters at the end of a word. e.g., comput* will find articles that contain computer, computers, etc.

3. On the result page, refine your search results by limiters if necessary. For example, you can limit results to Full Text, or Scholarly (peer-reviewed) Journals, or you can adjust publication time;

4.  Click on the article title to view abstract and to get the full-text or to cite or export the article.

ProQuest Database

Suppose you are searching on the topic in ProQuest: Impact of video games for university students.

1. Choose "Advanced Search", Enter key concepts or keywords, combine concepts with operator "AND", combine synonyms with "OR", limit to full-text or peer reviewed and adjust publication date as needed;

2. Select a field (from the drop-down fields) as you like, e.g. you can choose "Anywhere except full text - NOFT" to search the results containing search terms in all fields except full text, or you can choose "Document title -TI" to retrieve less results that contains search terms only in title;

• Phrase searching "" - enclose a search term in double quotation marks ("...") to make sure it is searched as a phrase
   
• Truncation * - stands for any number of characters at the end of a word. e.g., comput* will find articles that contain computer, computers, etc.

3. On the result page, refine your search results by choosing from source type, publication date, subject, document type. If "full-text" is shown, you can click to view the article;

4. Click on the article to view full text, save as PDF, cite, email or print.