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).
An announcement from OverDrive, "Today, we are
delighted to announce that Penguin eBooks will be available for “Get for Kindle”
in the same convenient manner as the other Kindle eBooks (US only) in your
OverDrive collection. The USB side-loading requirement has been lifted and
Penguin eBooks will have the same great ease of use as all other publishers’
eBooks. You can expect to see the change in your library’s collection soon."
