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Location: Section VII - Identifying the Appropriate Databases -- Journal
Articles through FirstSearch
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Identifying the Appropriate Databases -- FirstSearch for Journal Articles
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Documents
SECTION
VI
Identifying
the appropriate databases- FirstSearch for Journal Articles
I.
FirstSearch: Many, if not more, of the research sources we need, will come
from the non-book category (journals, newspaper articles, government documents,
etc.) It is true that we can find out if the University has a particular
journal from Library Online Catalog or WorldCat, but we cannot search for
specific articles in these databases.
For
this, we must use other databases, and there are quite a few. For the seasoned
and some what removed doctoral student who has spent 30 years in the library
working on his dissertation, these databases are as different as night and
day. Each one has strengths and weaknesses and he/she knows what they are
and how to use them to the best advantage. For normal students, however,
who work and/or have families and a life, the choice of databases is almost
overwhelming. Hence, we will not try to learn or use them all. We
will only look at a few of the most powerful ones in our field.
Just
as we had a dichotomy in the literature (books versus non-books) there is a
dichotomy developing in the non-book world, and I must say this one has even me
excited! It is electronic - versus non-electronic journals. The
former refers to Journals who's articles are available in full-text over the
Internet. More and more, it is becoming unnecessary to trudge across town
in the wee hours of the evening to get a journal article, only to find it gone
because someone has cut it out with a razor. For DE students in
particular, full text journal articles (and soon full text books) are the
greatest invention since the wheel, if not cable TV. We are not totally
there yet, however, so we must still rely more often than not, on the databases
for journals whose articles are not yet on-line. We will look at them,
the non-full text journal databases first.
You
may have noticed on the DE Communication Disorders. Library Home Page…
http://library.csun.edu/mhenry/de-comdis.html
…in
the left hand column, that two other databases are listed along with WorldCat
under FirstSearch. They are: Medline and Eric (see below).
Communicative
Disorders Distance Learners:
Databases and Document Delivery (Left hand Column)
Medline
and Eric are two very powerful databases for our field. We can access them
directly from these links.
However,
while we were in WorldCat through First Search, for example, we could access
any of these databases by clicking
on the "DATBASES" tab link (see below)…
First Search
(featuring WorldCat)
…and
getting a list of all the databases in First Search.
First Search (List
All Databases)
We
might note in passing that FirstSearch also has some additional databases that are very
useful to the field of Communicative Disorders. They include…
CINAHL--Cumulative Index of
Nursing and Allied Health Literature
ASTA--Applied Science and
Technology Abstracts, and
ArticleFirst – A review of the
index of articles from nearly 12,500 journals
We
can click on the database you wish to use. But, please note also that you
can actually click on a maximum of three of the databases to search all at the
same time. This will
substantiallty increase the range of our search!
And
remember that the little graphic " "
after many entries in FirstSearch means that the journal is owned by the
CSUN Library! Equally important
is this graphic, “
”
which indicates that the article is available online in full text!
Pursuing
the search using Medline this time, and the search terms,
“communication,” “disabled,” and “devices”
…
First Search
(featuring Medline)
…we can obtain at this time 465 article references.
The
first three listed references are flagged to be in Journals that are owned by
the CSUN Library. But none are
indicated to be full text articles online. Clicking the cursor on the first reference we get the full
reference:
In
addition to the typical Title, Author and Source information that is provided,
Medline gives us a useful abstract and some Descriptive Terms that are helpful
in expanding our search if necessary.
The
search could also be further expanded by using the same search words with three
(maximum) data bases, such as:
medline, eric and CINAHL:
First Search (List
All Data Bases)
Using
the same search word terms (communication, disabled, devices) as we did before
with Medline alone…
First Search (MEDLINE,
CINAHL, ERIC)
…we
come up now, using three databases, with a total of 1,189 references.
First Search Results (MEDLINE,
CINAHL, ERIC combined)
We
could reduce this number of references by perhaps sorting the list by date, so
that we get the most recent articles first; and/or by using a more
sophisticated Boolean search strategy.
An
important database that is not accessible through First Search for
Communication Disorders Students is Ingenta. We will discuss that database in the next section.