You have a number of search options available (below the search term input box) as soon as you start using this database.

You can check the box next to "Full Text" to limit results to complete articles. You can limit an article search to specific dates and even limit your searches to a specific publication (e.g. Scientific American) by typing its title in the "Journal Title" input box.

Once you find an article, click on its title to read the article. Some articles might contain illustrations, charts, photographs, or other pictorial content. Wherever available "HTML Full Text" and "PDF Full Text" links that appear under an article title will lead to articles as they were originally formatted.

HTML articles often do not contain all images, nor do those articles preserve the original article's formatting as it appeared in a publication. To see the article as it originally appeared, it is best to click the "PDF Full Text" link. See "Technical Notes" below for more about viewing PDF documents.

Search results can often be refined to fewer and more relevant articles using some different methods available in this database: - You can use the "Narrow Results" subject links on the left side of the results page to view results grouped under a particular topic. - You can use the sliders at the right side of the page (or type the dates in the Year input boxes) to limit results to a certain date range. - If you did not specify "Full Text" articles at the start of your search, you can filter out article abstracts and view only complete articles available by clicking the "Full Text" box in the "Limit Your Results" box on the right side.

Ebsco also offers a "Visual Search" option under the main search box at the top of the database page. A "Visual Search" attempts to portray your search results in visual groupings on the screen. Contrary to other "visual" searches you might have used, there is nothing graphical about this: this is simply another way to view text results and to work with those results in columns. Clicking on any box in the "Visual Search" window updates article information on the right side panel, which you can then click to get to the main article.

Since "Visual Searches" can take a while to display and sort through (since only so many can fit on the screen at once), you might feel more comfortable using the default standard search; however, if you have time to explore this option, perhaps give it a try to see if it works better for you.