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COMM 297 Han: Databases

Primary research article example

Databases: A reminder

"Broad-to-narrow" keyword search strategy

Statement: Are efforts to raise student awareness of colleges and university sustainability programs successful? 

Keywords:          sustainability          campus            program

Synonyms:         recycling                  college        methods

                           waste reduction      university      systems

1. Broad topic:  sustainability = 84,000+ articles

2. Truncate:     sustainab* = 100,000 articles

3. Sub-topic:   "college campus" - notice your results are more specific.

4. This list still contains newspaper, magazine, and scholarly journal articles.

     LIMIT results to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals. Refrain from limiting to Full Text. This may hide useful articles that you can access using       the Find It button.

5. Let's review the an article's record and tools.

6. Search your own topic. Find a potentially useful article, generate your citation, and save your article.

SU Databases

Academic Search Ultimate  Academic Search Ultimate is the world's most comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. 
 
MasterFILE Premier Provides abstracts and indexing for 2,650 general periodicals. Full text of articles for nearly 2,000 periodicals, and 5,000 full text Magill Book Reviews. 
 
JSTOR This is a general interdisciplinary databases that covers many topics. JSTOR specializes in providing full text articles going back to the earliest issues of a journal. It has only scholarly journals, not popular magazines.
 

MAS Fulltext Ultra Full-text for over 500 popular general interest and current events publications, as well as 253 full text reference books, nearly 100,000 biographies, 76,000 primary source documents, and an image collection of 116,000 photos, maps and flags.

  • Com Abstracts - citations to articles in Communications Journals.  From this page, choose Com Abstracts in the top right-hand corner to search the database.
  • Communication & Mass Media Complete - Full-text and citations for many journals and magazine articles about communication and media topics. 
  • CQ Weekly - Congressional Quarterly Weekly -  your opportunity to find out what's going on in Congress!
  • Contemporary Women's Issues - would be good for topics relating to women.
  • ERIC - "Education Resources Information Center," a database with full text education articles and ERIC documents as well as Find It links to non-full text resources.
  • Humanities International Complete - database covering the Humanities with quite a few Communications journals included.
  • PsycINFO - the gold standard database for psychology and related fields.
  • Social Sciences Abstracts - articles and citations for interdisciplinary fields such as addiction studies, anthropology, corrections, economics, gender studies, gerontology, minority studies, political sciences, psychology, sociology, and more.

Article Databases: By Subject and A-Z List