| Academic Search Premier
by Sara Albert
What Is Academic Search Premier And When Is It Useful?
Academic Search Premier is a database of articles and article citations from over 8,000 journals and magazines in virtually every academic subject. Use Academic Search Premier to find articles when researching topics in social sciences, physical sciences, technology, and humanities.
Strengths:
- Broad scope of topics
- High quality of the journals included -many are peer-reviewed
- Sheer number of journals indexed
- Full text provided for most documents (html, txt, and/or pdf format)
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Weakness :
- Too big? You may have to sift through many records to find the ones most relevant to you.
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How Can I Find Articles Using Academic Search Premier?
BASIC SEARCH looks for your search term in the author, article title, subject, and abstract fields. SEARCHING TIP : You can limit or expand your search with various options in the “Refine Search” section, or by using Boolean terms (AND, OR, and NOT) in your query. EXAMPLE: You want to read some recent articles about charter schools, and you only want to see records for which full text is provided. Step 1 : On the Basic Search page (see arrow), enter “charter schools” in the “Find” box.
Step 2 : In the “Refine Search” section, check the box marked “Full Text.”
Step 3 : Limit the range of publication dates to your desired time frame.
Step 4 : Click the Search button.
ADVANCED SEARCH allows you to search within specified fields. SEARCHING TIP : You can combine different terms using Boolean operators (AND, OR, or NOT), each term in whichever field you specify. SEARCHING TIP : If searching for an author, type in <last name>, <first name>. EXAMPLE: You want documents produced by the former president George Bush, but not any by his son George W. Bush. Step 1 : On the Advanced Search page, enter your subject term in the “Find” box.
Step 2 : Select the Author field.
Step 3 : Select “not” as your Boolean operator.
Step 4 : Enter the term to exclude in the box next to “not” and choose the Author field.
Step 5 : Click the “Search” button. 
IMAGE SEARCH allows you to search for images in various categories, such as photos of people, maps, or flags. Enter your search term, then select the category or categories or interest.
EXAMPLE: You want to look at a map of Norway . Step 1 : Click “Images” button on the green bar to get to the image search page.
Step 2 : Enter “ Norway ” in the “Find” box.
Step 3 : Select “Maps” as the category and click the “Search” button. CITED REFERENCES Academic Search Premier also lets you search for articles that have been cited in other articles. Click on the “Cited References” button and enter an author, title, source, or year, and Academic Search Premier displays a list of article records that meet your criteria and that have been cited by other articles. With another click, you can see a list of citing articles. BROWSING is helpful when you want to see what types of things are included in the database but you don’t know exactly what to search for. You can browse alphabetical or numerical lists of indexed terms, including author, ISBN or ISSN, journal name, and many others. To browse the indexes, click on the “Indexes” button on the green bar. If you want more help, click “Database Help” to get information about Academic Search Premier, or “Help” to get information about EBSCOhost databases in general. |
