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 Expanded Academic Index to find articles about your topic. If you need to select a topic, you may want to use the Finding Topics assignment 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 - EBSCO.
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 order, with the most recent article displayed first.
- Type the topic words: gun control in the entry box
- How many entries were retrieved in this search?
- Select one of the individual articles
- You can also combine more than one topic in a keyword search
- For example, do a keyword search for: gun control and children
- Check the Subject(s): header below the title of the article to see links to other articles about the same subjects.
- For scholarly or refereed journals, click the Refereed or Scholarly Journals box in the Limit your Search feature.
Guided Search
The Guided Search allows you to combine subject, keyword, and other types of searches (title, author, etc.)
- Select "advanced search" from the menu
- Use the drop down menus to combine different types of searches
Example: Subject (SU): gun control
Author (AU): joslyn
- Select "view" under your search results near the bottom of the screen
- Your search will retrieve articles about gun control with Mark Joslyn as an author
Limiting
This feature allows you to limit your search to full text articles, to particular dates, or to articles from particular journals
- Select Guided Search
- Do a search for: gun control
- Click on the full text box to limit to articles available in full text
- Type in the date: 2000
- Your search will retrieve only full text articles about gun control which appeared in 2000
Assignment
Use the information above to find three full text articles about your topic.
If you need more help searching Academic Search Complete - EBSCO, try the Search
Tips link.
Please direct inquiries about this page to Dale Vidmar.