Finding Articles using Finding Articles using Academic Search Academic Search

CompleteComplete

A Presentation by Alicia A Presentation by Alicia StocktonStockton

MLIS 7100MLIS 7100

Fall 2008Fall 2008

You are doing a paper on Zen Buddhism and its origins. You need three scholarly articles.

•You’ve decided to go to Academic Search Complete because your professor says it has a lot of good sources.

•But how do you find what you need?

Getting started:

On the left side of the library home page, there is a box labeled Online Resources.

Click on Databases.

When you get here click on the letter A under List Alphabetically.

Click on Academic Search Complete.

Here’s what the basic search screen looks like. This is the first page you’ll see when opening the database.

There are 464 articles. We need to limit our search. One way to do this is to click on some of the terms to the left. We’ll start by limiting to just academic journals.

This cuts our results almost in half to 256. We need to narrow it further to find things on the birth of the religion .

We’ve decided to move to an Advanced Search to easily combine search terms. We’ve found 4 articles. The first seems like it would be good for the paper. It is available right now as it has PDF full text.

Bodhidharma was one of the founders of Zen Buddhism, so we looked him up as a search term.

The first result looks interesting. Click on Find them at Emory to see how to access it.

Unfortunately it is not full text, but the system links the user to the library’s catalog, so they can search for it in print or request it through Interlibrary Loan

At the right of your results, you can limit by publication date or just to full-text. This is useful if you are looking for cutting-edge scholarship or you are pressed for time and need information immediately.

There are also options at the bottom of your screen to limit your search criteria to narrow your results and refine them.

We’ve limited to full text, scholarly articles printed in English about Zen Buddhism.

Here are some of our results. All link to online full text. So now we have a good start on our paper.

Conclusions: • Look at your assignment thoroughly to make certain you know all the search terms. •Don’t simply accept the first two or three results. Read and investigate. •Start early so you can take advantage of Interlibrary Loan . A lot of sources are not available online. •Finally, always ask the librarian if you get stuck.