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Academic Search Complete

by Sarah Albert


What Is Academic Search Complete And When Is It Useful?

Academic Search Complete is a database of articles and article citations from over 9,300 journals and magazines in virtually every academic subject. Use Academic Search Complete to find articles when researching topics in social sciences, physical sciences, technology, and humanities.

Strengths:

  • Broad scope of topics
  • High quality of the journals included -many are peer-reviewed
  • Sheer number of journals indexed
  • Full text provided for most documents (html, txt, and/or pdf format)

Weakness :

  • Too big? You may have to sift through many records to find the ones most relevant to you.

 


How Can I Find Articles Using Academic Search Complete?

BASIC SEARCH: Looks for your search term in the author, article title, subject, and abstract fields.

EXAMPLE: You want to read some recent articles about charter schools, and you only want to see records for which full text is provided.

  • On the Basic Search page (see arrow), enter charter schools in the Find box.

  • In the Refine Search section, check the box marked Full Text.

  • Limit the range of publication dates to your desired time frame.

  • Click the Search button.
screenshot - Academic Search Complete basic search screen

SEARCH TIP : You can limit or expand your search with various options in the  Refine Search section, or by using Boolean terms (AND, OR, and NOT) in your query.


ADVANCED SEARCH: Allows you to search within specified fields.

EXAMPLE: How do I find documents produced by the former president George Bush, but not any by his son George W. Bush?

  • On the Advanced Search page, enter your subject term in the  Find box.

  • Select the Author field.

  • Select  not as your Boolean operator.

  • Enter the term to exclude in the box next to  not and choose the Author field.

  • Click the  Search button.

screenshot - academic search complete advanced search interface

SEARCH TIPS

  • You can combine different terms using Boolean operators (AND, OR, or NOT), each term in whichever field you specify.

  •  If searching for an author, type in <last name>, <first name>.



IMAGE SEARCH: Allows you to search for images in various categories, such as photos of people, maps, or flags. Enter your search term, then select the category or categories or interest.

EXAMPLE: You want to look at a map of Norway .

  • ClickImages button on the green bar to get to the image search page.
  • Enter Norway  in the Find box.
  • Select Maps as the category and click the Search button.

CITED REFERENCES: Academic Search Complete also lets you search for articles that have been cited in other articles.

  • Click on the Cited References button and enter an author, title, source, or year.
  • Academic Search Complete displays a list of article records that meet your criteria and that have been cited by other articles.
  • With another click, you can see a list of citing articles.

BROWSING: This is helpful when you want to see what types of things are included in the database but you don't know exactly what to search for.

  • You can browse alphabetical or numerical lists of indexed terms, including author, ISBN or ISSN, journal name, and many others.
  • To browse the indexes, click on the Indexes button on the green bar.

If you want more help, click Database Help to get information about Academic Search Complete, or "Help" to get information about EBSCOhost databases in general.


This page was revised by Jennifer Coffey in Spring 2006.
This page was revised by Julia Mitschke in Spring 2007.
INF 382S: Library Instruction and Information Literacy, taught by Dr. Loriene Roy
School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin

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