EIU Booth Library

Explore a Database: Academic Search Complete

Posted on August 29th, 2018

This week we explore how to use the all-inclusive (multidisciplinary and informative Academic Search Complete, a database hosted by EBSCO.

Academic Search Complete is like every “choose your own adventure” book you read as a kid. With so many options for refining searches, from limiting to one journal for your search terms, to choosing a range of years of publication for articles on your topic, to even the type of document you’re looking for, like a book review or an editorial, Academic Search Complete gives you the choice to peruse at your leisure and find those sources that inform your research, no matter you’re writing!

Because Academic Search is a “choose your own adventure” style of database, we won’t be focusing on particular articles you can find. We’ll instead give you an overview of Academic Search Complete’s options and features, so you can get along choosing your own path and those documents unique to your assignment or thesis!

The homepage of Academic Search Complete might look a little intimidating with all of the menus and options, but never fear! The varied amount of documents gives it all its charm.

The top three search bars are like the ones we’re all used to, that being, they’re for entering keywords and phrases you might be looking for. The “Select a Field” option at the end of each search bar is to narrow down the keyword. Fields like author and titles can be found, but also,  titles like reviews and products and geographical can be accessed!

Under the heading ‘Search Options’ is where Academic Search Complete gets more exciting. Under the subheading ‘Search Modes and Expanders,’ you can narrow what information you’d like Academic Search Complete to find for you by refining what search terms you’d like it to focus on. Ticking bullets on the left side of the subheading like ‘Find my entire search terms,’ will search for all the words you put into those top three search bars. And selecting boxes on the right side,  like, ‘Apply related words’ and ‘Also search within full text of the articles,’ will further refine your search to give you the exact results you need, while also limiting the sources you usually have to sift through.

Under the next subheading, ‘Limit your results,’ you can search for the types of sources you might need. On the left side of the box you can limit results to only full-text documents or only scholarly journals. You can also search for a particular publication, like Psychology Today, for example.

Also on the left side are ways to limit what type of document you’re looking for. There are many different options in the scroll-down menu, things as basic as a report or an interview, to items such as literary criticisms to even product reviews and obituaries.

Likewise, you can search for the number of pages you want your results to be within. No one wants to read more than one 50 page articles. And with this feature you can limit the number of pages you want your results to be. Some types of images can also be found.  Options for visuals like maps, photographs, charts and many more are found at the bottom of the left side.

But wait! There are also tons of options on the right side to further refine your searches and locate those hard-to-find, but perfect sources for that paper or presentation. At the top of the right side, you can search for sources only in a certain date range, and they type of publication you’re looking for. Items like health reports and newspaper (plus a whole lot more!) can be found in this scroll-down menu.

You can also search for the language in which you’d like your sources to be, or whether you want your sources to be a cover story, an image quick view, a full PDF file, or from Booth Library’s own extensive collection of periodicals!

The possibilities for narrowing your results are endless with Academic Search Complete, leaving you with the best sources and more time to spend on writing that paper! (Or catching up on Netflix, we won’t judge.)

See you back here at the Ref News Blog for more information on what our research librarians are up to, and also another Database of the Week!