Want to impress your teachers this year? 

Of course you do!  And to help you prepare, the library is here to arm your back-to-school readiness with an awesome database called Academic Search Premier.  This database helps you find highly credible sources of information for your research papers and presentations.  With a few basic steps, you can find the print sources you need (digitally formatted articles from newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals) to support your research topics whilst creating sturdy works cited pages.

Here’s how:

You can access Academic Search Premier from any computer with an internet connection. To do this, log on to www.starklibrary.org.  Once you are on the library’s home page, hover your mouse over the green RESEARCH tab and from the drop-down, click on DATABASES A-Z.
 

An alphabetized list of databases will appear.  Scroll down just a little and click on the link to Academic Search Premier. 

(NOTE: If you are accessing this database from an off-site computer, you will need to log in with your Stark County District library card number and pin number.  Contact a library associate if you need assistance with your pin number.)

There are a number of ways you can search for articles with this database.  For the best results, utilize the database’s limiters (special tools you can use to specify your search) found in Search Options.

With these “limiting” options, you can:

·         Search Full Text copies. (These results will provide full versions of the articles.)

·         Limit to Scholarly/Peer Reviewed sources. (Use this if required by your instructor.)

·         Refine year of publication. (Current information is best for most research.)

·         Search for phrases in quotes (ex. “body image”) to find exact word combinations.

 

 

Specify your results further by clicking the Advanced Search link under the search bar.

With Advanced searching, you can specify where you want your search terms and phrases to be found (ie. Title, Abstract, Author, etc.).  The example below shows a search that will result in articles written specifically by that author.



You can also use a tool called Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) which are great for refining your results.  These are used to connect words together and tell the database to return results that contain some or all of those words.

·         AND – returns articles that contain all of your terms, such as body image AND teenagers.  AND will narrow your search, returning fewer results.

·         OR – will return articles that contain either of your terms, such as teenagers OR adolescents.  OR will broaden your search, returning more results.  (OR is excellent for synonyms.)

·         NOT – excludes articles that contain a certain term, like body image NOT women.  That would get you results that focused on men and body image issues.  NOT will narrow your search, returning fewer results.

Want to learn even more about the Academic Search Premier database?  Register for the Effective Research Techniques program happening at Perry Sippo branch library on August 12th (for high school students) and August 13th (for college students).

Register online at www.starklibrary.org (under the Calendar tab) or call 330-477-8482.