Finding Magazine and Journal Articles
The Library provides access to many periodical indexes which can be used to find articles in magazines and journals. This assignment explains how to use an interdisciplinary database called Academic Search Complete to find articles about your topic. If you need to select a topic, you may want to explorethe Finding Topics tutorial first. Here are some different types of searches you can do, followed by sample searches. To try the following sample searches, select Academic Search Complete.
Simple/Keyword Search
The advantage of a Keyword Search is that it looks for your words in titles and anywhere in the text, as well as in subject headings, so it retrieves more articles. The disadvantage is that some of the articles may not focus primarily on your topic. The Keyword Search Screen allows you to create a keyword or boolean search using AND, OR and NOT to create a very broad or very narrow search. By default, the results of a search are displayed in descending chronological order, with the most recent article displayed first.
- When you open Academic Search Complete, you are in the Advanced Search mode.
- Type the topic word(s): obesity in the first Find search box near the top of the page, then click Search.
- Notice the number of entries were retrieved in this search?
- To refine your search, You can add an additional search term in the Refine Results search box.
- For example, add the work television to search for: obesity and television.
- Notice the number of entries retrieved in this search is less than the previous search, and the results include a combination of both search terms.
Select a Field Search
- You can also specify a specific search "field" using the Select a Field drop-down menu. For example, you could search for the words only when they appear in the Title of an article by choosing the Title field. Notice the variety of fields that you can employ to help refine or limit your search such as, Subject, Author, Abstract, and more. As you become more familiar with the database, you learn how to use these specific field searches more fluently.
- Use the drop-down menu to Select the Title (TI) field to the search terms: obesity and television.
- Notice the number of entries were retrieved in this search? The results are less because both search terms appear in the title. You should also notice that the items that we found will seem much more relevant than our previous searches.
- Use the drop-down menu to Select the SU Subject Terms field for the search terms: obesity and television.
- Again, notice the number of entries were retrieved in this search?
Narrow your Results
- For scholarly or refereed journals, choose the Scholarly Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals link. For more information about scholorly journals, go to the Self-Paced Tutorial: Scholarly vs. Popular Artilcles.
- To further refine your search, look at the Subject: Thesaurus Terms section at the left to see a listing of headings or words used describe the topic. NOTE: It is always highly recommended that you check the subject terms that are listed for a search or for a selected article.
Limit your Results
This feature allows you to limit your search to full text articles, peer-reviewed publication, specific publication dates, journal titlesor documents with images.
To limit to full text articles, click in the "SOU Print and full-text journals" box.
Assignment
Use the information above to find three full text articles about your topic. If you need more help searching Academic OneFile, try the Search Tips link at the top right of the search page to discover the many feature of using the Academic OneFile interface for finding journal articles.
Remember: If your search results indicate no results were found, you may want to refine your search terms and try running the search again.
Please direct inquiries about this page to Dale Vidmar.