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eBooks on EBSCO

A guide to searching and using eBooks on the EBSCOhost platform.

What are Subject Terms/Subject Headings?

PsycBOOKS provides a link to Thesaurus in the top menu bar.  Thesaurus, on the other hand, is a list of subject headings created for a subject specific database such as PsycINFO and PsycBOOKS.  Thesaurus is a very useful tools for finding the words used to describe your topic in a particular database and improve your search results.

After locating a subject heading, click on the heading to view additional information about the subject and how it is defined and used in a specific database.

For example, here is the additional information about the term Human Trafficking in PsychINFO which uses the same thesaurus terms as PsycBOOKS.

Details include a definition of the term, when it was indexed, and other terms you might want to include to narrow or broaden your results. You can click on these to begin a new search or to combine the terms.

Using Subject Terms/Thesaurus

Select Thesaurus in the blue menu bar at the top of the EBSCOhost screen.

Select Thesaurus, at the top near New Search.

Toggle the browse type of your choice under the browse bar.

Term Begin With is an alphabetical search of all included subjects.

Term Contains locates entered terms anywhere in the included subjects.

Relevancy Ranked returns a list of subjects which most closely match the entered terms by subject.  Relevancy Ranked tends to produce the best results.