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Hi, this is Allison Carr, the Communication & Mass Media Librarian. This short video will show you how to find scholarly peer reviewed journal articles using the database Communication and Mass Media Complete.
00:00:13
All of our databases are listed on the front page of the library website and we organize them by subject.
00:00:22
If we look at all the database for Communication, you can see Communication and Mass Media Complete is the first one suggested.
00:00:30
When you are off campus, you will have to log on using your campus email user name and password.
00:00:44
The first thing I like to do is change to advanced search. I find that having more boxes helps me keep my search organized.
00:00:54
The databases will do pretty well with the search words you choose, but you want to make sure you’re not putting sentences or questions. So instead of how does social media impact teens, we want to break this apart and search for social media and teens.
This is going to look for articles that have both those words of phrases in them.
00:01:21
You can see here we got 302, one of the first things we want to do is limit to peer reviewed. The left side of the screen is also where you can add additional limiters like dates if you have any restrictions. I don’t recommend you using the full text button because that’s going to overly limit the number of articles you get back.
00:01:41
Instead, we’re going to find the PDF full text in the database or use Get It to find a copy of the full text.
00:01:51
There are a couple of things I want to point out from the search results page. You have a lot of the citation information here: the title of your article, the author, the name of the journal, in this case is Communication Quarterly, it was published in 2012, the volume is 60 issue 3 and the page numbers. You will need to include the DOI if you are using APA citation style, so if that’s available be sure to include it.
00:02:17
When you look at the next page, you get a lot more information. You get these subject terms. The database is searching for instances of your words that you used to search, where as these subject terms will tell you more about what the article is actually about. It gives you more broad information about the article that you can find articles that are like that. In this case, if we wanted to find more articles about sexting, we could click on this subject term and it’s going to search for us again and give us a whole new list of results.
00:02:57
Let’s take a look at a different article. In this case, we don’t have any images, we still get the same kinds of information, and the PDF full text.
00:03:13
This example here, Do Rich Teens Get Richer. Here we don’t have access to the full text. Instead we’re going to use this Get It link and this is going to go out and instantaneously search all of our other database and journal subscription to see if we have a copy of it.
00:03:31
In this case we don’t have it, you can see no full text available but we do have an option to allow you to request it through Interlibrary Loan. We have staff in the library who will find the article at another university, get a digital copy and you’ll get an email telling you it’s ready to download and read.
00:03:52
That’s certainly an option for you and if you start early enough, you should be able to get the articles you need, but keep in mind that it will take a few days to get it to you.
00:04:01
A couple other things I want to point out on this item page. If you look on the right side, you have a whole bunch of tools to choose from. The first thing I want to point out is if you want to save an article or the abstract of an article, you want to email it to yourself. This will include the full text, if it’s available through this database otherwise it will give you a link to get back to this page where you can use Get it to find the full text.
00:04:29
Another thing I want to point out is if you are saving articles using a word document or google doc, or if you want to just have a list of links in your email, choose this permalink option. This link here is the only way you’ll be able to get back to this article. If you try and copy and paste this link from your browser, it’s going to break and you won’t be able to find it again. So use the Permalink if you ever see that in any database.
00:04:58
The last thing I want to point out is this Cite option. You can choose which citation you want, so in this case here is your APA Citation. This is it right here. Be sure to check and make sure it’s correct. Often times, the big thing that is the biggest problem is in the article title; you want to make sure its standard casing, where only the first letters and proper names are capitalized. Other times you’ll see examples where it's all caps, or the first letter of each word is capitalized, that’s incorrect for APA. Otherwise, these APA citations are almost always correct. But always double check it again and an example citation before you use it.
00:05:47
If you have any questions, come stop by the Research Help Desk or you can send me an email at acarr(at)csusm.edu
