Some of your topic words may have the appearance of being good keywords, but it’s good to learn to recognize the words that are unproductive for searching .  Words such as impact, effects, benefits, consequences and so on, are words that are referred to as Bucket Terms because they are too generic.  We all want to use these bucket terms, but authors use very specific words when they write, like the pebbles that fill the bucket.

For example: You may want to know the effects of Hurricane Katrina, but authors aren’t using the word “effects.”  Their papers are going to focus on the specific outcomes instead.  They’re using words like flooding, fire, drowning, looting, homelessness, displacement, and insurance losses.  They may never use the word effects, even though that’s the point of their article.  Using the specific terms will be much more effective.

-Sommer

-Sommer

However databases also classify articles in journals to which the Capella Library does not subscribe. So how do you see those articles?

In the lower part of the screen in most of our databases is a limiter box that  usually defaults to being checked,  labeled “Full Text”. If you uncheck this limiter you will see articles that may be in another Capella Library database by clicking the link Check Article Linker, or are not in the Capella Library and are available through Interlibrary Loan.  So for example, if you are doing a long term project such as a dissertaton or major paper, you may want to remember to uncheck the full text limiter when you search and see all the articles the databases has classifed on your topic.

Any questions? Ask-a-Librarian

Robin

When you access the Business Source Complete database (via the library’s Articles, Books, and More  link), look for the More link on the dark blue bar along the top of the screen. 

Hover over this link and you will see a drop-down menu appear. Click on Company Profiles.

From here, simply search for your company’s name in the search box.  Voila!

For more help finding Company Information in LexisNexis and on the web, check out these fantastic guides:

Company Information in Lexis Nexis

Finding Company Information

And as always, if you need assistance – don’t hesitate to give us a call in the library!

~Jennie

1. If your assignment is not due right away, stop searching and send us an email. We will respond to it the next day we are in the office. We start working on those emails at 8:00am. 

2. If your assignment is due soon remember that you are probably not getting results for one of two reasons:

• You are using the wrong words (try other terms that mean the same thing). If you can’t think of these terms try the Thesaurus or Subject Terms link at the top of most of the Library databases.
• You are in the wrong database (remember each database covers a unique set of journals). For example if you are in ERIC try Proquest Education Journals, if you are in Business Source Complete try ABI/INFORM.

3.  You may want to review the following brief tutorial Finding Journal Articles  , it’s less than 10 minutes and it may remind you of some concepts you have forgotten about for getting good search results.

Hope some of these tips help!

Robin

Once you have opened the LexisNexis database,  just follow these easy steps:

1)  Type in your search terms in the Search Terms box.  

2)  Check the TV and Radio Broadcast Transcripts box in the Search within area and make sure that is the only box checked.

3)  Choose the correct time period or date range from the Specify date area.

4)  Click Search.

Look through your results list and choose the one you want.

That’s it!

Kim

Our new tutorial Finding Resources for Your Literature Review is a comprehensive overview of specific search techniques you can use to assure you leave “No Stone Unturned” in finding everything available on your topic for your literature review.

The tutorial includes the following new media pieces:

Defining Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Resources

Keyword Searching for your Literature Review

Bibliographic Mining and Cited Reference Searching

Using Dissertations for Research 

Searching by Methodology

It also includes a NEW tutorial on RefWorks that shows you how to sign up for an account, store, organize and print APA formatted references of your citations.

Check out these new resources and let us know what you think!

Robin

Check out this article from the January 2007 issue of gradPSYCH –

“Finding the right tools: Student researchers need to know what to look for in a measurement instrument.”

This article will outline the steps you need to complete when choosing an instrument, including:

• Knowing what you need and what you need to measure.
• Befriending your librarian
• Doing some quality control
• Getting permission

The library has access to all four of the databases mentioned in this article: Mental Measurements Yearbook, Tests in Print, PsycINFO, and Health and Psychosocial Instruments.  You can access these databases from the library’s Articles, Books, and More web page.

For more information on finding tests and measures in the Capella Library, please review  the guide Finding Tests and Survey Instruments on the library’s Guides and Tutorials page (scroll down to Resources for Doctoral Learners).

If you have any questions, please contact us in the library!

~Jennie

If you have a specific title in mind, you can always check Journal and Book Locator and search for that title.  But did you know that you can also run a search to find all the journals in the library that have certain keywords in their titles?  For instance, if you want to see if we have journals about sports psychology, you can run the following search:

Journal and Book Locator search

(sport* will search for any word that starts with the word sport: sport, sports, sporting, etc.)

 You will get the following four results.  Note that two of them are not located in databases that you can find on the Articles, Books and More page:

Journal and Book Locator Results

This brings me to another method you can use to find articles from our stand alone journals:  Search databases with the Full Text box unchecked.  Most databases actually index more journals than they include full text.  By searching with the full text feature off, you will get additional results.  In fact, if you’re a doctoral learner working on your dissertation, we recommend that you always search the databases with the full text limiter turned off to make sure that you are conducting a thorough search of the literature.

When you run a search without limiting to full text, you will then naturally get some results that will not have a full text link.  Instead, some of the results will say Check Article Linker or Linked Full Text (Ebsco databases) or Link to full text (ProQuest).  Simply click on the link to see if the article is available in either another database or from one of our stand alone journals.

To continue with our sports psychology theme, you would pick an appropriate database for your topic, in this case PsycINFO, and then run a search such as the one below, making sure to uncheck the full text limiter:

PsyINFO database search

Now, even though PsycINFO doesn’t include the full text for the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, we can pull up results for it (and other stand alone journals) because PsycINFO does index it.  Simply click on the link to get to the full text:

PsycINFO search results

As always, if you have questions about article searching, Ask a Librarian! 

 -Kim 

By now you have probably heard of the Boolen Operators: AND, OR, and NOT.  These connectors are used between your keywords to tell the database how you want to combine your words and what kinds of terms should be present in your search resuts.  But what happens when you need to use different connectors (maybe a combination of ANDs and ORs) in one search box?  You need to “nest” your terms!

Nesting involves putting parantheses around like concepts to keep them together.  These parantheses are also code for the database to perform the command that’s inside of the parantheses first before adding what is outside of the parantheses, just like in math equations.  Take this search for example:

alcohol AND (adolescents OR teenagers) 

With this search the database will retrieve articles on alcohol AND adolescents or alcohol AND teenagers.  Without the parantheses the database takes your search terms literally and will search for your terms in the order you type them.  For instance, if you removed the parantheses from the bolded example above, you would find articles on alcohol and adolescents as well as articles on teenagers (without the alcohol aspect).

And sets of parantheses can be nested inside other sets of parantheses, like russian nesting dolls. 

(Alcohol OR drug OR (substance N3 abuse)) AND (teenagers OR adolescents)

Remember, the command inside the inner-most parantheses always gets processed first.

Nesting your terms comes in particularly handy when searching online in search engines like Google.  Google does recognize Boolean Operators like ANDs and ORs and will obey search commands like using parantheses in your search!  By nesting your search terms, you are better able to control how Google handles your search terms.  And when you’re searching millions upon millions of information sources, every little bit helps.   Next time you’re searching in Google, try nesting your terms and see how your search results change!

If you would like further explanation on how nesting works in the databases or online, give us a call in the library and we can walk you through how to effectively use this concept.

–Jennie