Occupational Therapy: Subject Guide: Basic Searching

Simple Searching & Viewing Results
For a basic keyword search, type the word or words you are looking for into the search box, and click Search. PubMed will suggest phrases that complete your entry or that are related to the words you're entering.  The next page will show your search results.

Setting Filters (aka Limits)
Use the filters on the left sidebar to narrow down your results by specifying different categories such as language, type of article, age, gender, etc.  

Changing the Display Settings
Click Display Settings at the top left hand of the page to change how much information you see for each citation, the number shown per page, and how they are sorted.  Click Abstract from the pull-down menu, or click on the hyperlinked article title, to see the citation, abstract, and related records information. 

Use My NCBI to permanently set your display settings via your personal log-in.  Learn more about My NCBI here.

Look for the icon or another "free full text" icon in the top right of the abstract page, and click the icon to access the full article text.

Saving, Printing, and Emailing Search Results
As you search PubMed you can temporarily store articles of interest on the Clipboard. To add an article to the Clipboard, check the box next to the article, and select Clipboard from the Send To link located to the upper-right corner above your search results. You will get a message stating that your article has been posted to the Clipboard.

After you have placed items in the Clipboard, a link to the Clipboard will appear at the upper-right of your screen. To view all the items in the Clipboard, click that link. Articles already posted to the clipboard are marked below their citation information with "Item in Clipboard" in both the Summary and Abstract displays.

From here, you can decide what you would like to do with your citations. Using the Send To menu:

• Choose File if you want to save the citations as a text file.
• Choose Email if you want to email them to yourself or someone else.
• Choosing Collections saves your citations to your My NCBI account.
• Choose Order only if you know that the Library doesn't subscribe to the journal(s) and you have a Loansome Doc account set up.

To print your citations, select Print from your Internet's browser window. 

To remove an item from the Clipboard, click the Remove from Clipboard link below the citation. 

Adapted from UNC Health Sciences Library.

Choosing Multiple Databases
The EBSCO interface can search multiple databases at the same time.  Click the Choose Databases link to add more.

Check off the additional databases you want to add and click OK.

Key Word Searching
Using keywords is the broadest way of searching and can result in a large number of citations. When you enter a keyword or word phrase in the search boxes and use the default fields selection, the database will look for these words within the Title, Abstract, and Subject Heading fields of each record.

You can refine your results with the limits filters located on the left side of the screen.  Adding limits will reduce your number of results.

Create an EBSCO user name and password to permanently save your results. Look for the icon, or "Linked full text" to access the full article text.

Saving, Printing, and Emailing Search Results
As you search EBSCO you can temporarily store articles of interest in a Folder. To add an article to the Folder, click the folder icon under the article.  After you have placed items in the Folder, a link to the Folder will appear on the right of your screen. To save items permanently, log in.

From the Folder View you can email, print, save or export your items.