In this article, we present, throughout two basic models of damped nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS)-type equations, a new idea to bound from above the fractal dimension of the global attractors for NLS-type equations. This could answer the following open issue: consider, for instance, the classical one-dimensional cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation u t + iu xx + i|u| 2 u + u = , ∈ L 2 (R). "How can we bound the fractal dimension of the associate global attractor without the need to assume that the external forcing term f has some decay at infinity