Advanced Database Searching
(Text-Only Version)

 

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Welcome to Information and Library Services' Advanced Database Searching presentation!

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Advanced database searching features such as limiting to scholarly articles and/or full text articles, limiting by date, finding articles which cite a particular author, and browsing will help you search more precisely and save time since you won't have to browse through irrelevant articles.

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In this presentation we will look at ABI/Inform, Academic Search Premier, and Expanded Academic ASAP. These databases have a wide range of information and lots of full text, and are a good place to begin your research.

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Let's start with ABI/Inform.

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From the Information and Library Services main Web page, click on the link for Articles and More.

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Select ABI/Inform from the list of databases.

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Click on the Advanced Search tab at the top of the screen. From this Advanced Search screen you can type in your search terms and select from the drop-down menu the field for your search.

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To limit to scholarly articles, check the Limit results to scholarly journals, including peer reviewed box if you want retrieve results from academic or scholarly journals.

You can limit your search based on the date the document was published by clicking on the drop-down date range menu.

Check the Limit results by full text documents only box if you want to retrieve results that only include full text articles in ABI/Inform. This approach is useful if you only need a few articles, but it is a double-edged sword! You should be aware that many other citations and abstracts link to full text available in other UMUC databases through Find It. You will eliminate those articles if you choose to Limit results by full text documents only.

Clicking on the More Search Options tab will allow you to narrow your search results by allowing you to browse and select from more search fields such as publications, subjects and people.

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To browse a search field, click on the browse link next to the empty search box. For example, let's click on Browse Subjects.

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Search by scrolling through an alphabetical list of terms or by entering terms into the empty search box and clicking on find term. Once you find a term that you want to add to your search, click on the Add to Search button. The term will be automatically entered into your search form.

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The advanced search features for Academic Search Premier and Expanded Academic ASAP are similar to the advanced search features in ABI/Inform, although each of these databases has a different search interface because they are all owned by different companies.

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Let's look at Academic Search Premier now!

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You can see that Academic Search Premier has many of the same features of ABI/Inform: You can limit your search results to full text, scholarly journals, and specific dates, as well as browsing subject terms.

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Academic Search Premier also has a unique feature that allows users to perform Cited References Searches.

A Cited References Search locates articles that cite a specific article. For example, if you want to locate and read all of the articles that cite a particular article in which you are interested, you can accomplish this by performing a Cited References Search.

To perform a Cited References Search, enter search terms in the author, title, source, year, or all fields and click on the search button.

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The results are displayed below the Cited References sub-tab. To view the citing articles for the listed documents, you can check the box to the left of an article that you are interested in, click Find Citing Articles and retrieve a list of Citing Articles.

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Other databases, such as the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index focus on cited reference searches and are much more sophisticated. You may want to try them as well!

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Expanded Academic ASAP also has some helpful advanced search features. Let's take a quick look at them!

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Expanded Academic ASAP also allows you to limit to full text articles, scholarly articles, or by date, and allows subject browsing.

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Many databases, including ABI/Inform and Academic Search Premier, allow users to browse through the contents of publications. In Expanded Academic ASAP you can browse through the contents of journals by clicking on Journal Search.

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Enter some title words or the full title of the journal in the search box and click on the search button. From the list of results, select a journal to browse by clicking on the journal title. Select a year and an issue to browse. You will then be able to browse through all of the contents of that particular journal journal issue.

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If you need more help, please contact library staff by clicking on Ask a Librarian from the Information and Library Services main Web page.

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Thank you for watching this presentation. Visit us often for all of your information needs!

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