That is because all EBSCOhost databases have undergone a transformation involving a brand-new interface and new search features.
Databases from EBSCOhost have been part and parcel of the CBS Library portfolio for many years and they have looked much the same for all those years. However, now there are new user interface and new search features to explore.
The new interface appears simpler and cleaner and boasts brand-new features including personalized dashboards and new ways to share and save resources. Navigation has moved to the left-hand panel below the search boxes, and the new user interface is responsive and optimized for mobile devices.
Advanced search with new options
If you go to Advanced Search and navigate to Search options below the search boxes, you will find some interesting new search methods:
- you search by proximity by default, which means that a simple search for two words like public governance without any further specifications will yield results where the words public and governance are separated by five words or less, in any order.
- If you want to search public governance as a compound noun or a phrase, you need to use the traditional inverted commas like so “public governance”.
- if you want to see all results that include both words regardless of the distance between them, we recommend that you run a classic Boolean search e.g. public AND governance.
What is SmartText Searching?
EBSCOhost has also introduced SmartText Searching, which means that you can copy and paste large chunks of text into the search box, for example a paragraph or an entire page. SmartText Searching technology condenses the input text to the most important search terms based on term frequency (TF) and inverse document frequency (IDF) calculations of the terms in the query and the databases searched, and then creates a weighted Boolean query for search execution.
Create a personal Dashboard
In My dashboard in the left-hand panel, you can create projects and collect within them references and searches under your own headlines. To get started with the My dashboard you need to create a personal account in EBSCOhost. If you had an account before the new user interface, that account is still active, and all you need to do is log in.
If you want to dive deeper into the EBSCOhost functionalities, new and old, check out the Quick Start Guide
You can also just jump into EBSCOhost at the deep end.