Workaround for EBSCO's NOT operator glitch

When searching in EBSCO, you may have noticed that the NOT operator doesn't play nice with the Limits.

That is, let's say you've done a search. You limit to the Full Text articles and export them. Then, you want to select all of the not-full-text articles and export them. However, if you do so, you get zero results, despite the fact that there are definitely not-full-text articles in the list.

The only workaround for that is to export all of the results into your bibliographic manager and then use the FT set which you previously exported to recognise and remove the FT articles from the list. By hand.

However, if you have a limit other than Full Text, you may be able to force the EBSCO database to perform a NOT correctly. You can do this by using the Indexes at the top of the page. Here's how:

 At the top of the page, in the blue bar, click on More and select Indexes

Where it says Browse an index, click the drop-down menu and make a selection. For instance, you could select Language and then browse for English.

Add your search to the Search field by clicking its checkbox and then clicking the Add button.

Now you can combine this limit with other searches and use the NOT operator.

Sometimes it's difficult to figure out what Index to use. To find out, first use the limit that you're interested in using the normal limits system.

Select any article in the list and click its title.

On the right-hand side, click the Export option.

Choose Generic Bibliographic Management Software and click the Save button.

Use your browser's Find option to find the text of the limit. In this example, I found the word peer (as in peer reviewed).

Now we can see that the two-letter code is PT.

So, we can use the search PT peer review* to find peer reviewed articles. We can then use NOT to find the articles which are not peer reviewed.