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Academic Search Complete Tutorial

English Composition Students:

You are going to learn how to find articles using the index, Academic Search Complete.

Follow the directions below and fill in the blanks.

Be sure to pick your instructor's name in the box below. When you are finished, your answers will be sent to your instructor.

Click on the question marks for hints and help as you work.

If you have any questions or problems with this assignment, email Vicki Mills (UA Librarian):

millsv@u.library.arizona.edu

Choose your instructor's name from the list below -- make sure your instructor's name is highlighted.

Last Name:

First Name:

Your E-mail Address:

Choose your course:

Class Meeting Time:

The Assignment:

Step 1: Identify your research topic. (See examples below.)

Ex 1: "How are women's roles in the family changing?"

Ex 2: "Does advertising influence teenage behavior?"

Ex 3: "What research has been done about Vietnam veterans and depression or post-traumatic stress?

Write your own research topic in the box below (if you don't have your own topic yet, use one of the sample topics above.)

Step 2: What are some keywords from your topic above? You will use these later in your search.

Ex 1: women and roles and family and change

or mother* and family and role*

Ex 2: teen* and advertising and influence

or teen* and advertising and behavior

Ex 3: vietnam and veteran* and depression

or vietnam and veteran* and stress

The use of the asterisk * tells the computer to search for any endings of the word, singular, plural, or any other endings. Ex: teen* = teen, teens, teenager, teenagers.

Write your keywords in the box below. Be sure to connect different terms with the word and.

Why use "and" between words?

Step 3: In the window to the right, click on Article & Database Searching (grouped under Search & Find)

Step 4: Under "Popular All-purpose Databases," scroll down until you see Academic Search Complete and click on it .

Off-campus users: you must enter your UA NetID and password in order to connect.

Step 5 : You are now in Academic Search Complete.
Type the keywords that you listed for your topic in Step 2 in the search boxes.

Should I check the "Full Text" box? No - because you may miss a good article.

My instructor says I can only use "research" or "scholarly" articles. What are those?

Click the Search button when you're ready.

Step 6 : Look at your list of citations (records, or hits).

How many citations did you get?

the number of citations will be at the top of the
center column -- ex.: All Results: 1 - 20 of 78

Notice that you can use the links in the right column to sort your results by Academic Journals, Magazines, Newspapers, etc. This is a nice feature to use when you need to locate scholarly or academic articles.

What if I didn't find enough citations?

What if I found too many citations?

Step 7 : Read the titles of some of your results. For the ones that seem promising, hover your cursor over the magnifying glass to see the abstract. Choose one article citation. For this tutorial, choose an academic journal or magazine article, not a newspaper article. Because Academic Search Complete displays no more than 20 citations per screen, you may need to go to the next screen to find a good journal citation.

Click on the blue link to the article title to see the full record for that article. Fill in the important parts of the citation:

What is the title of the journal?

What is the title of the article?

What is the date of the article?

What are the date, volume and issue numbers (sometimes there is no issue number)

What are the page numbers?

Academic Search Complete does a nice job of showing you how to cite articles in several different citation styles, including MLA.

When you have the full record open, you will see six icons for different functions at the top right of the record. Select the one for cite and cut and paste the MLA citation for your article in the box below.

Step 8 : If your article is full text (this means an electronic version of the article is linked from Academic Search Complete), there will be a link, labeled either PDF full text, HTML full text, or Linked Full Text. Not all articles are full text in Academic Search Complete.

Is your article full text?

Articles that are not full text in Academic Search Complete, may be full text in another index or database, or they may be owned by the Library and stored in paper or microfilm in the Library's collection.

Step 9 : (Only do this step, if you did not get your article full-text in Step 8.)

If your article is not full-text in Academic Search Complete, you will see this link: Get Full Text or Document Delivery. Sometimes this will link directly into the full-text of the article, so click on it and see if it works for your article.

Did you get to the full-text of your article?

If you could not get your article in full-text, you can either Ask a Librarian for help by coming to or calling the Information Commons Reference Desk, doing a Chat reference session with a librarian or emailing the library. You can also request your article through Express Documents, select the Document Delivery link on the Library homepage and fill out the request form.

We can help you get any article you are looking for. Never pay for an article you find on the Internet, always ask the library and we can get it for you for free.

Congratulations! You're done!

Questions? Problems? E-mail Vicki Mills (UA Librarian) for help:

millsv@u.library.arizona.edu

Evaluation of the tutorial? (this is optional)