 Article databases like those provided by EBSCO can be a treasure trove of information. For the next few minutes, let's look at some strategies for effective searching in EBSCO databases. But first, what is a database? An article database is a space in which a tremendous amount of information is collected and organized to make it findable. This information can include articles from newspapers, magazines, and academic journals, books, images, and other resources. EBSCO provides access to a number of different databases, each with its own specialized focus. EBSCO databases can be quickly accessed from the Beam Library homepage under the Quick Links menu. Click Academic Search. For this search, I'm looking for articles about gaming, but at this point, I'm only searching within the single database Academic Search Complete. When beginning a general search on a topic, it's usually a good idea to choose databases. Each of the databases in this list has its own special focus or subject area, which you can read about by hovering over the icon. Now for gaming, I want to select each database that I think might be related to my topic. And then I hit OK. And now, I'm searching for my topic in multiple databases. There are many effective strategies for searching EBSCO. Let's try a strategy that uses the database subject headings, the specific language used in the database to organize this information. The first step is to narrow the language gap between what I want to call my topic and the specific terms the database uses to describe gaming. So, I enter my term here and hit search. My natural language turned up a number of hits, but in order to make sure that I'm finding relevant results, I need to locate the language the database uses to describe this topic. Scroll down on the left side to find these drop-down menus. When I open Subject Thesaurus term, I find a list of subject headings. By clicking Video Games, I add this subject heading to my original search, which you can see in this box. But if I click the subject heading a second time, every item associated with this subject heading is retrieved. And in this way, I've created a pool of relevant results. Note also that these subject headings are listed in the citation information for each result. I can click on the title, view the subject headings, and select one to retrieve only relevant results. So, no matter how the articles themselves describe my topic, using subject headings is a good strategy for finding relevant results. After using subject headings to create a pool of results, I can refine my search by using specific vocabulary. For example, I'm interested in researching video games and children. If I enter children in the second field and hit search, the database looks in the title, author, abstract, and subject headings of all these articles for the word children. And if I change this box to TX All Text, the database will also search all the text of every available full text item for my term. I can also refine my search by entering child followed by an asterisk. This tells the database to search for any form of the term, like child, children, childlike, etc. I can even add more search terms like this, and even more fields for searching, like this. And in this way, I can refine my searching for better results. In this box, I can limit my results. For example, if I want to retrieve only full text articles from 2005, I can do it like this. Now please note that scholarly peer reviewed refers to journals that go through a strict peer review process. Clicking this box can greatly limit your results. More options for limiting results, for example by language, are available here. And in this box, I can limit by type. For example, clicking magazines will pull up only items from popular level magazine literature. In this way, I further refine my list of results. Now for many items, the PDF or HTML full text is immediately available. If full text is not available, here are two options for locating the full text by checking to see if it's available elsewhere in the Beam Library databases or by requesting the article via interlibrary loan. If you have any questions about these options or need help locating full text, feel free to ask a librarian. To open an item citation page, click the title. This page offers several options. Keep in mind that the citation for the item can be found here. If you have any questions about using Epsco databases, we are happy to help. Just ask a librarian and be sure to check out the other video guides brought to you by the Beam Library at Oklahoma Christian University.