Short Guide to Searching Education, General Science, Humanities, and Social Sciences Fulltext

Select the Database or DatabaseS from the library's alphabetical list of electronic databases. If you are off-campus, you will be asked to enter your name and ACCESS card number. The ACCESS card number is under the barcode on the back of your ACCESS card.

You can search these databases individually, or you can search more than one at a time. Start by connecting to any one of them and then clicking on the hotlink and marking the databases you wish to search at once:

Simply select the databases you wish to search simultaneously by clicking in the little boxes. Environmental issues, for example, often have BOTH scientific and social aspects, as do education topics. Think about the different perspectives you might want on your topic.

Searching Tips Once you have selected the database, you will see this search area:

You will be describing your subject in the boxes labeled Search For: Think of each of these 3 lines as representing a different aspect of your subject. For example, if you wanted to look for articles on mainstreaming autistic children into regular classes, you would look at your subject as having two different main ideas:

1. Mainstreaming

2. Autistic children

You would therefore be using 2 of those boxes labeled Search For:

The key is what words to put in each box. So, here are a couple of tips on choosing words/phrases to use:

If at all possible, use a single word rather than a phrase. For example, instead of autistic children, just use autistic.

Truncate words to pick up all forms, especially plurals! In Education Fulltext, the symbol to use is the asterisk, *. So, use mainstream* rather than mainstreaming. Use autis* rather than autistic.

For each of the ideas, on each line, separate different words expressing that idea with an or. In this example, you would want to say mainstream* or inclus* on one line and autis* or asperger* on the other, like this:

Smart Searching

You can limit where the computer searches for the words you entered. The default is to search much more broadly than you intend! To the right of each of the search boxes is another box labeled simply as: The default is to search by keyword. If your search retrieves a lot of irrelevant, or borderline relevant material, then change that to SUBJECT. If you are looking for articles by a particular author or in a specific journal you can add those elements to your search.

 

Not happy with your results?

If you are not finding anything on your topic, you probably need to use fewer words or consider different words. If this doesn't work, you might need to seek professional help from a librarian by either coming to the library Reference Desk, or telephoning the Reference Desk at (408)554-4658 or using our Ask A Librarian online service.

When going through your results, which look like this:

notice the colorful icons. The little blue icon indicates the whole article is available as an html text document. The red icon, , indicates the article is available as a pdf file. For the results that are NOT available fulltext, click on the little icon with a blue arrow, , to open another window and automatically do a search in the Library's Electronic Print and Journals List.

As you scroll through your results, mark the ones you want to print/email/save later by clicking in the little box, , next to it.

To print/email/save, click on the button in the left blue panel . That will offer you a menu of options.

Read them carefully! You might not want the defaults. Notice that Which records only gets you the ones on the previous page. If you have been marking records, you need to change that for sure!

This page was created on July 31, 2003 by Gail Gradowski.

Last updated March 6, 2006.