Searching for full text e-journal articles
If you need to search for journal articles on a topic, one of the
electronic journal provider databases is a good place to start.
Academic Search Complete (also referred to as EBSCO) provides
access to nearly 6,000 multidisciplinary journals in full-text. You can
use most of the techniques used for searching this database to search
other journal databases.
Getting started
To get to Academic Search Complete, go to the Journals page on the
Library web site (found in the collections section).
Scroll down to the ‘Electronic journal collections’ section, and you will
find ‘Academic Search Complete’ at the top of the table. Then click on
the ‘Academic Search Complete’ link, and you will be asked to enter
your OU Computer user name and password, if you have not already
entered it recently. A new window will open.
You will then be taken to the first search screen, which defaults to the
Advanced Search. Although Academic Search Complete calls this the
‘Advanced’ search, it simply means that you are shown more options
to search with, which can help you to focus your search and retrieve
more useful results. You can start a New Search at any time using the
link at the top left of the page.
At this point you might be tempted to type in some words for what you
are looking for in the boxes. Let’s say you’re looking for information on
children who are educated at home, or ‘home school’. When we made
a first attempt at this search our search picked up over 1700
references, and some of the first ones didn’t even look relevant. So
how can we make our search more effective?
Choose your search terms
First of all, we need to think what words we are going to use for our
search. Think about alternative words for the topic you are looking for,
as well as alternative spellings (e.g. American/English). If you want to
know more about choosing search terms, the Safari tutorial has more
information:
http://www.open.ac.uk/safari/php_pages/s03t07p010000.php
Limit your results
Academic Search Complete gives you lots of options to limit your
search so that you find material that is relevant. It includes abstracts
or brief records of articles as well as the full-text. If we just want to
see full-text articles, we can select this option. There’s a tick box on
the search page. We can also limit the date range of what we find to
the most current (or to older) material.
Search options
There are tools and techniques that can be used to narrow or widen
your search, in order to hone in on the most relevant material. These
include:
Phrase searching
Phrase searching means that the database will look for two words
occurring next to each other in a phrase, rather than separately. We
can use a phrase search by putting our terms within inverted commas.
We’ll try searching for ‘Home schooling’ as a phrase, choosing the
Subject Terms option from the drop down search box. We’ve limited
the date range to Jan 2000 to Jan 2009 so that we only see more
recent publications. How many results can you find with this search?
We found just over 500.
Subject index searching
When articles are added to a database like Academic Search Complete,
they are given subject headings which reflect their content. Let’s see if
we can find out the correct subject heading for home schooling. On the
blue bar above, click on the ‘Subject Terms’ link. This brings us to the
subject index. On the screen that appears, type in ‘home schooling’
into the search box and click on ‘Browse’. Although there are two links
for Home Schooling, the main one is clearly just ‘HOME Schooling’. We
can tick the box to the left of this subject term and click the ‘ADD’
button to put the subject term in the search box at the top of the
page. Click ‘Search’ to see all of the results in date order – we found
748 articles when we did this search.
Truncation
Truncation is represented by an asterisk (*). To use truncation, enter
the root of a search term and replace the ending with an * to find all
forms of that word. So for instance we can search for home school* in
the same way as we did before (“home school*” in the subject field),
which brings back more results than for “home schooling” because it’s
picking up “home school” etc. as well. Let’s try to refine our search by
adding another search term to search for home schooling in Great
Britain. If we choose the ‘All text‘ field to search in for both, the
database will search the whole of the text for our terms.
Further help


Academic Search Complete’s own online help – click on the ‘help’
link at the top right of the screen
Safari – the OU’s online information skills tutorial

The Library’s Helpdesk Team can be contacted in a number of
ways for one-to-one help from librarians – see the Library’s web
pages: http://library.open.ac.uk/help/
Information Literacy Toolkit
Last updated: July 2009