Using Academic Search Premier

Aimed at High School Students

By Dan Pfeifer

This is Johnny Clipart. He has decided to do his research paper on the

constitutional ideas of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was a president

right?

Because Johnny is getting ready for college, this assignment requires

the use of academic journals

Academic journals…I assume those are

on twitter

So, what’s an Academic Journal, you ask?

• It’s a collection of scholarly peer reviewed articles written by experts.

I literally don’t know what any of those words

mean

• Scholarly – each fact or opinion is documented by an exact source

• Peer Reviewed – the article is looked over by a group of experts before it is published

• Experts – people who have first hand experience with the subjects like professors or graduate students.

• Non-experts include journalists, staff writers, correspondents, or some guy writing blog posts. Journalists might seem like experts, but they are really just summarizing and explaining the work of others. So, a journalist would be an expert on being a journalist, but not on cancer research.

DEFINITIONS ALERT!

So where do I find these so called “Academic Journals?”

• Academic Journals are usually found in academic databases – a collection of information used for research and writing.

Databases…that sounds complicated. Why can’t I just use Google?

• Well, internet searching is good for some things in school:

Like answering quick questions

Giving us general background information

Wait…who was Abraham Lincoln again?

And providing important up to date information that is too current to find in other places

Ohhh, and duh…it’s really fast and easy to use

Can we cut that down to 0.5 seconds?

But for other things, the ole internet, isn’t so great

For one, there’s just so much information out there, it’s impossible to get through it all. And a lot of what comes up during a search is irrelevant, a duplicate, or just plain junk

I can’t read more than 78 million

results in one sitting

And much of what’s out there could have been written by anyone

But History.com Staff is one of my favorite writers

Mysterious Author Alert!

In addition, information can be published by anyone.

Angelfire: providing dubious internet content since 1986

Finally, some information is opinionated or biased, which means the person who wrote it, isn't’ necessarily

basing their conclusions on fact

Worse than Millard Fillmore? Really? C’mon.

OK. I get it. The internet is an apocalyptic wasteland filled

with biased nuts venting their slanted opinions on

Angelfire hosted discussion boards.

Not entirely, there’s good stuff on the internet too, but it takes work to find.

Like using advanced features to search by domain name.

Work?

Using special internet search engines like Google Scholar

Or using select websites that are created, or reviewed by experts

Ok I’m convinced, finding good stuff on the internet isn’t as

easy as I thought. But what’s so good about

these so called databases?

Glad you asked. First we’re going to log onto Academic Search Premier and see some of the

advantages databases offer

Then we’ll type our subject into the search bar Advantage 1: More

manageable number of results

Advantage 2: Results come from scholarly and peer reviewed journals, rather than just anybody

Advantage 3: You can also limit by type and even subject to get more specific results

Advantage 4: It’s easy to determine who published the information. Databases only deal with reliable and trustworthy publishers and most information was originally in print. So, you

don’t have to ask yourself :“Is this a good source?” If it’s in a database—it almost always IS a good source.

Are you saying anonymous Facebook

posts aren’t reliable?

Got it? Now Let’s try searchingFirst we’ll go back to our results…

28,000 still seems like

a lot

Next we’ll refine our results using the advanced features

By clicking on Peer Reviewed

And Academic Journals

Because I was paying attention,

I remember those terms

from slides 4 & 5

Now our search results are more refined

4,834…still seems like a

lot

Next we can use Boolean search techniques to further refine our subject

Again. I have no idea what you’re saying to me.

Boolean searching is just a way to use a few key words (or operators)—like AND or OR—to limit and refine search results.

Examples of Boolean Searching

Using the term AND tells the search engine must include both “Abraham Lincoln” and “constitution”

This makes our number of results go down.

We can add more “AND’s” to get even more refined results

Now our results our even lower

Just make sure the keywords being used are relevant

I’m extremely interested in this article

We also can use the Boolean term “OR” to expand our results

Abraham Lincoln AND Constitution AND (Slavery OR Emancipation)This search was for:

The search engine is being told that the results must contain: Abraham Lincoln, Constitution and either Slavery or Emancipation

Other Boolean “tricks” include:

• Putting “quotes” around your search terms. This means the exact term, in the exact order, has to be found in the page

• Using a “-” or the phrase NOT will tell the engine eliminate results that contain that phrase. For example: Abraham Lincoln AND Constitution NOT tacos

Now that you know how to effectively use databases, all that’s left is the actual reading.

Wait what?

Sorry, you have to do that on your own

Bibliography• Jerz, Dennis G. "Academic Journals: What Are They?" Jerzs Literacy

Weblog. Seton Hill University, n.d. Web. 17 Oct. 2015. <http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/academic1/journals/>.

• Library Research Education Program | Yale University Library. Yale University Library, n.d. Web. 17 Oct. 2015. <https://www.library.yale.edu/researcheducation/pdfs/Searching_Evaluating_Resources.pdf>.