Library tutorial for science
Section 5: Searching for journal articles on a topic
through databases

Journal articles are among the most useful sources in science, especially for new developments and speculation, reviews of trends, specific data, statistics or applications. You cannot find journal articles on a topic by searching the library catalogue for that topic. To find journal articles on a topic, search databases.

Which database?

First choose a database that will cover your topic.

• Biosis previews (Biological abstracts) for plant and animal biology
• PubMed (Medline) for medicine and human and animal biology
• Zoological record for zoology

• Georef and Geobase for geology
• AESIS for Australian geology (up to 2001)
• Inspec for physics
• SciFinder Scholar for chemistry

• Agricola and CAB abstracts for agriculture
• Streamline for Australian natural resources
• Water resources abstracts for water resources
• ASFA1 and ASFA3 for aquatic organisms and pollution

• Mathsci for mathematics
• Compendex for engineering
• Inspec for electrical and electronic engineering and computer science

• Web of science and Scopus for all subjects
• Academic search premier, Academic OneFile - cover major journals in all subjects; useful for social aspects - can search the full text of some articles
• Australia/New Zealand reference centre for Australian public affairs aspects of science
• Factiva and Electric Library for newspapers

• Search engines such as Google Scholar or search engines from a single publisher such as Elsevier's ScienceDirect are not good first choices as databases because they lack balance. Google Scholar doesn't state which journals are included. ScienceDirect does not have articles from other publishers.
  However, publishers' search engines have the advantage of searching the full text of articles. This may be useful for, say, a specific method or a very new development.

How to link to a database

• at the Library home page choose the Databases tab then the subject of interest to you.
• or search a known database name (e.g. biosis previews) in the Library catalogue and at the full catalogue record click the link at Link to e-Resource

Most databases can be searched on any computer including your own. You may be asked for your University user name and password.

How to search a database

• Below is a search in the database Academic search premier on the topic: The privacy of personal genetic information.
• Alternatively look at this quick video on searching Web of Science for articles on carbon geosequestration.

Which database?

A database like Academic search premier, which indexes all subjects, is useful for topics like this with a social aspect. Which of the databases listed earlier might also be worth searching?

Choosing terms

You could take the topic's key concepts to be genetic and privacy. Some authors will use different terms for the concepts genetic and privacy so what alternative terms (synonyms, plurals etc) could you use for each concept?

Answer You could try terms such as: gene(s), genetic(s), genome privacy, confidential(ity), consent

Search methods

To reach the database, search for Academic search premier in the Library catalogue, go to its full record view and follow the link at Link to e-Resource.

Look at Academic search premier's Help, which shows that:

• like most databases, Academic search premier uses the operators AND, OR and NOT to combine terms in a search. ***If you don't know about these operators, see Searching with AND, OR, NOT.
• Academic search premier uses an asterisk * as a truncation symbol to search for a word stem e.g. genom* to search genome, genomes, genomic
• phrases can be entered as they stand without quotes

Which of the following is a reasonable way to enter your initial search?

• (genom* or genetic*) and (privacy or confidential*)
• (genom* and genetic*) or (privacy and confidential*)
• (privacy and genetic*) or (genom* and confidential*)

Run the search. You get a list of citations like the example under Search results below.

Experiment with your search and with Refine search options. Consider:

• limiting to Scholarly (peer reviewed) journals
• searching terms in the full text of articles as well: this gives a bigger but less relevant result
• gathering extra search terms from article titles or abstracts or background reading (see section 3) e.g. discrimination, property rights and redoing the search with them
• trying Academic search premier's thesaurus through the Subject Terms button
• removing any search terms (e.g. common words with multiple meanings) that produce irrelevant results.

Search results

Your search results include citations like:

You can click the article title to get full details including abstract and subject terms. You should at least save or print:
author
article title
journal title
volume and issue number
pages
date

What are the journal title, volume and pages in this citation?

Answer The journal title is Journal of social issues, the volume number is 59, the first page is 301.

• Change Sort by: Relevance to Sort by: Date to display the most recent articles first. Current information is important in science.
• To print, e-mail or save references, click Add for each item then Folder has items, mark the items and Print, E-mail or Save.

Finding the full article

• Sometimes you can reach the full text of a journal article directly through the database. Articles are usually in pdf or html format. For example in the citation above, click PDF Full Text to read the full article.

• Sometimes there is a Check fulltext options link. This may lead to the full article.

• If these direct methods do not work, always search the Library catalogue by the journal title as you normally would. Database links are convenient but a direct Library catalogue search is the only reliable guide to the journals we get in print or electronic form.

Summary

Databases vary in appearance but for best results most need to be searched in ways similar to this.

• Identify the main concepts and terms in your topic. Search a range of terms.
• Use the operators AND and OR to combine search terms.
• Use the database's truncation symbol (e.g *) to search plurals etc.
• Experiment. Don't accept your first result. Refine your search.
• Save or print at least the author, article title, journal title, volume and date.
• Link to the full article directly from the database or, if that doesn't work, search the journal in the Library catalogue.