Guides & Bibliographies

Academic Search Complete

Introduction

Academic Search Complete contains more than 5,400 full-text journals including more than 4,500 peer-reviewed publications. This is the "world's most valuable and comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database" covering the social sciences, ethnic studies, psychology, social science, women's studies, and many more academic fields. Many of the files are in the PDF format and require the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print the articles.

Academic Search Complete is available to current UT Arlington faculty & students at this webaddress:

eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/db-acadsearchcom.cgi

Searching

A truncation symbol in Academic Search Complete is an asterisk (*), and when this symbol is put at the end of a word, the database will be searched for all of the possible endings--suffixes--for that word. For example, the command "feminis*" will have the computer search engine look for all possible endings of this word. It should find, "feminist," "feminists," and "feminism."

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(homeless* OR RUNAWAY*) AND (POLICY OR POLICIES)

The first part of this statement will find material about the homeless population and runaways. The second part will look for the words "policy" or "policies". The AND then links the first set with the second. This should be an effective way to look for policy or policies for persons without shelter.

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Last Modified: 2007 August 27.
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