Now that you have executed a search strategy, are the results what you were looking for? It may be hard to tell initially. When looking at a list of results in EBSCOhost, you can click on the title for the article record. This record will give you further information about the article, including an abstract, which is a short summary of the article. Some records may not contain an abstract. This could be because the article is not long enough to have been abstracted (it might just be a letter or abstract of a presentation) or the record is new and the article has not been summarized yet. Reading the abstract is very important in determining if the article addresses your need. The screenshot below shows a typical article record.
The information in the article record is separated by fields. Each field gives one piece of information about the article. Some are obvious, like the title and author fields. Others that you might not know about can be really helpful. For example, the publication type field lets you know if the article is an editorial or a review article or a letter, and as noted earlier, can help you determine what type of evidence an article is. You don’t want to bother reading a letter to the editor if you have been charged with finding a systematic review. When you see links in an article record, it usually means that you can click on that link to run a search using that criteria. For example, clicking on the author’s name will find other articles by that same author.
As you see above, article records in EBSCOhost may show options for retrieving the full text of the article. If the article is directly linked from the database, you'll see "Linked full text." The other option is "Full Text Finder." This option uses a link resolver to find the full text from the publisher. If both options are available, "Linked full text" will likely open more quickly.
If we do not have access to the article, you'll see a link to request it via interlibrary loan. This link will open an article request form. Completing this form starts the interlibrary loan process.
You will recall from the list of terms shown earlier that interlibrary loan (ILL) is when libraries share resources with one another. When you request an article via ILL, when the article is available, you will receive an email with a link to download the article as a PDF. We ask that you allow 2-3 business days to receive an article from ILL. It may not take that long, but as you can see in the image below, there are several steps involved, so delays are possible.
You can find more information on interlibrary loan on the library website.
If you found an article somewhere besides a library database, you can still use the Library's subscriptions to access the full text. If you have an article title or citation but don't know how to get the full text, we have a guide that can help. Follow the link below to learn how to use DOI, PMID, and other useful quick retrieval techniques.
