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Academic Search Complete: Searching

Academic Search Premier is an excellent source of scholarly journals in all academic disciplines. More than 8,000 journals are indexed and full text is provided for more than 4500.

Search Strategies

How to search effectively

The easiest way to search is to use Advanced Search to form a search string on your topic. Start with a question, then break the question into the most relevant nouns, and put them in individual blanks. On the left, you can combine AND, NOT, and OR to narrow (AND) and broaden (OR) your search. On the right, you can focus your search on ALL FIELDS, or specific fields like AUTHOR, TITLE, or SUBJECT. The feature gives you a lot of control over how the search is processed! 

advanced search

Additional tips:

Put phrases in the same blank with quotations. This will make sure only results with both words in the phrase are returned together in that order. Academic Search Complete has a built-in pretty efficient phrase search, but it's a good idea to use quotes anyway as a general practice for using database phrase searching because it varies from tool to tool, and is not always exact without them.

For example, if you perform a search with and without quotes, you will usually notice you get a few fewer results when quotes are used. You can also adjust the Boolean terms at the ends of the search blanks to broaden or narrow your search.