Google's answer to scholarly searching. Wide-ranging, including links to articles, books, theses, student papers, and whatever else it deems scholarly.
An archive of scholarly journals, often dating to the first issue of the journal (to the 1800s in some cases). Newest issues of journals (last 3 to 5 years) are usually not included.
Scholarly business journals and newspaper/magazine articles dealing with business and commerce. Also provides detailed statistics and company profiles.
Covers the core disciplines in Women’s Studies to the latest scholarship in feminist research. Coverage includes more than 871,000 records and spans from 1972 and earlier to the present. Over 2,000 periodical sources are represented. Focused on scholarly journals, with the inclusion of some activist publications.
Find full text and citations from more than 1300 journals in the area of environmental history, conservation, marine science, energy, geography, environmental law, and more.
2. Take advantage of any “times cited” or “cited by”
features (available most prominently in Google Scholar, EBSCO and JSTOR).
3. If I search for DOCTORS PATIENTS COMMUNICATION, what
does the database search for?
Most will search for both the plural and
singular forms of the word. (The library catalog and WorldCat will NOT do
this).
Most will search for your terms as a phrase,
though some will assume you meant to put an AND between the words. (For
example, all EBSCO databases will search for a phrase; the library catalog will
put an AND between each word.)
4. To search for a phrase, put quotation marks around the
phrase: “doctor-patient communication.” (this applies in every database I’m
aware of).
5. To search for synonyms, combine them with an OR.
(doctors or physicians) and patients and (communication
or discussions)
6. To expand your search, use wildcards or truncation
figures.
An asterisk frequently is used to represent
multiple characters: comput* will retrieve computers, computing, etc.
A question mark is frequently used to represent
a single character. Wom?n will retrieve women andwoman (though many databases will
automatically search for both now).
7. When searching full text (in a database such as JSTOR
or LexisNexis), use proximity search operators (sometimes called search
connectors).
JSTOR: "doctor patient"~10 : Requires
that the words be within 10 words of each other)
Lexis-Nexis: doctor w/10 patient : Requires that
the words be within 10 words of each other.
Doctor
w/s patient : Requires that the words be in the same sentence.
Doctor
w/p patient : Requires that the words be in the same paragraph.
8. Examples of other interesting search functionality
(usually available by looking at the Help pages):
In LexisNexis: “length>500” : the article
must be greater than 500 words.
In JSTOR: Doctors patients communication^7 : The
word communication is 7 times more important than the words doctors and
patients. Rank these results by relevance accordingly.