Guides & Bibliographies

PolicyFile Guide

Introduction

PolicyFile contains nearly 4,700 full-text journals including more than 3,600 peer-reviewed publications. This is the world's largest scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database covering aspects of social sciences, ethnic studies, education, language, arts and literature, medical and life sciences, physical sciences, and many more academic fields. Many of the files are in the PDF format and require the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the articles.

PolicyFile is available to current UT Arlington faculty & students at this webaddress:

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

Searching

A truncation symbol in PolicyFile 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 "terror*" will have the computer search engine look for all possible endings of this word. It should find, "terrorist," "terrorists," and "terrorism."

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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