Using Academic Search Complete

Academic Search Complete is a general database and can be found from the URI Libraries homepage by clicking on "Find Articles" then "General & Reference." Read the description.

You'll see that Academic Search Complete:

Indexes different types of periodicals – popular/trade/scholarly
Covers all different subject areas
Has a great deal of full text online.

Click on the link and try to do a little exploration: Work on some trial searches, based on your research topic. Separate different concepts with AND – smoking and depression. You can use OR – (smoking or nicotine) and depression

Limit Your Results
Below the search box there are several limiting functions you can use before you conduct your search:

Full Text - only articles that include full text will be retrieved (not recommended)
Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals - only articles from scholarly (or peer-reviewed, refereed) journals will be retrieved.
Publication - restricts your search to the publication title that you enter (assuming that Academic Search Complete indexes that journal)
Document Type (article, editorial, review, etc.)
Number of pages
References Available
Published Date From
Publication Type (journal, newspaper, etc.)
Language
Cover Story
PDF Full Text (not recommended)

Your Results

Search results are listed 10 on a page. The total number of "hits" or records retrieved is shown at the top of the list with links to additional pages. Each short entry includes the citation to the article as well as other information about the availability of each article, such as "HTML Full Text," "PDF Full Text" (Adobe Acrobat PDF file), "Search @ URI Libraries" or other notes.

NOTE: Don’t disregard non-full text over full text – the number of full text articles is based on agreements between publishers and the database vendor, not on the quality of the article. What’s included and what isn’t is arbitrary.

Seeing Results

Click on an article and look at the record. It will consist of several "fields" - the Title, Subject, Source, Author, Abstract, other identifying terms, and (maybe) the full text of the article.

The citation includes all the information you need to find the article (and to cite it in your paper's bibliography or your final project for this course.) The citation is made up of several parts - title, publication, date, author, volume. issue, page numbers, standard number and subject terms (some publications include some other fields).

Look at the field entitled "Subject(s)." Is one of your search terms listed there? This field can come in very handy when you are searching for articles on the same topic. The Subject field uses the database's "controlled vocabulary" (discussed below) to identify what the article is about. You can click on any of these terms and bring up another set of articles on that topic.

Can you tell if the articles are from popular or scholarly journals? Review the differences from earlier lessons to help you figure it out. In Academic Search Complete you can limit your search to just scholarly journals right from the search page. Click on the box next to "Peer Reviewed" and conduct the search.

Most articles have an abstract, a few sentences describing what the article is about. If available the full text will follow the abstract (if available).

On the right of the screen you will see a column titled "Tools". These tools offer options for printing, emailing, and citing the article. The print function turns the record into a printer-friendly version and the e-mail link will allow you to send the entire article.

You can get back to the results list by clicking on the "Result List" button in the menu near the top left of the page. You can also add the articles you are interested in to a folder for later retrieval. NOTE: You must create an account if you want to access the articles in your folder at a later time.

Tools for Academic Search Complete

The link below to Database Tools provides you with helpful tools while using Academic Search Complete.

Database Tools