Locating Scholarly, Trade, and Popular Resources

Academic Search Premier

Academic Search Premier is a multidisciplinary database that allows you to search for scholarly, trade, and popular resources. Here on the Advanced Search page, you can experiment with different combinations of search terms. Among other things, you may also choose to limit your search for articles that are peer reviewed or those that we have full text access to.

Notice the “Choose Databases” link at the top of the page. Here you can choose to perform a search across several databases at one time.

This is the menu that will pop up after clicking the “Choose Databases” link. As you can see, there are a number of subject specific databases to choose from. Simply select the ones that are relevant to your topic. However, please be aware that the more databases you select, the more results you will have to sift through.

You may also choose to limit your search to articles that we have full text access to by selecting the “Limit to Full Text” option. This will filter out all results that consist of just a citation. In the event that you are restricted to using peer reviewed sources for your project, select the “Limit to Peer Reviewed” option. This will filter out all results that have not gone through the peer review process.

To start our search, I placed the keywords red, meat, disease in the search boxes. Notice the quotes around “red meat”. This instructs the database to treat these two words as a single phrase as opposed to two separate words when searching through articles. Also note the AND between “red meat” and disease. This instructs the database that all of these keywords should appear in our results.

For this search, I limited the results to full text articles. Since I would like to include trade and popular resources in our results, I left the “Limit to Peer Reviewed” box unchecked.

As you can see from the results page, there is a healthy mixture of scholarly, trade, and popular resources to choose from. You will see that an icon appears to the left of the article title in the results list. The icon is determined by the source type. For example, the second result is an article from a scholarly journal, so the icon is a picture of an academic journal article. This may help you during your initial scan of the results list. Please note that articles from trade publications, magazines, and newspapers will all show the periodical icon. Use the source type limiter on the left side of the page to limit your search to just one of these source types.

In the event that we decide we want all of our results to be peer reviewed, we can click the “Limit to Peer Reviewed” box on the left side of the results page, found in the “Refine your results” section. You can see that academic journal articles and reviews are the only types of sources that appear on our results page. Although it is not the case with this search, limiting the results to include only peer reviewed material will sometimes include articles from trade publications in the results.

Going back to our original results page, you may decide that you want to limit your search to scholarly journal articles. I was able to do that by clicking the “Academic Journals” box found in the “Limit by Source Type” section, located on the left side of the page. Looking at the results, you can see that only academic journal articles appear.

Let’s say that you want to limit your search to articles found in trade publications. Again, I was able to do that on our original results page by clicking the “Trade Publications” box found in the “Limit by Source Type” section, located on the left side of the page. When we look at the results now, you can see that only articles from trade publications appear.

You may want to search for popular resources. Back on our original results page, just click the “Magazines” and “Newspaper” boxes found in the “Limit by Source Type” section, located on the left side of the page. The results list now contains only articles from popular resources.

ProQuest Complete

ProQuest Complete is another multidisciplinary database used to search for scholarly, trade, and popular resources. In addition to searching by subject area, you can limit your search by resource type, document type. You may also filter out all results that are not full text or peer reviewed.

On the right side of the advanced search page, you can choose to search by subject area. Clicking on any one of these links will confine your search to the subject specific databases in ProQuest Complete that are related to that subject area. For example, when I select “Business” as our subject area, I limit my search to ABI/INFORM Complete and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text: Business.

Just as we saw in Academic Search Premier, we have the option here of limiting our search to include articles that we have full text access to, as well as peer reviewed articles. All we have to do is check the appropriate box.

We also have the option of limiting our search to include certain source types in the “Source Type” section on the left side of the page. In addition to periodicals, you can also include sources such as reports, wire feeds, blog posts, and conference papers. Directly under the “Source Type” section, you will find the “Document Type” section, where you can search for document types other than articles, such as case studies, conference proceedings, and market research.

For our initial search, I used our “red meat” AND disease keyword combination. I also used the “Full text” limiter. Since I would like to include scholarly, trade, and popular resources, I left the “Peer reviewed box unchecked. Under “Source Type”, I selected “Scholarly Journals’, “Trade Journals”, “Magazines”, and “Newspapers”. In the “Document Type” section, I limited our search to “Articles”.

As you can see on our results page, there are a number of relevant articles from each of the source types to choose from. Notice that depending on the source type, a different icon appears to the left of the title in the results list. For example, the first result is a newspaper article. A newspaper icon appears to the left of the title.

To limit our search even further, we can apply the “Peer reviewed” filter found on the right side of the page, above “Source type”. This will exclude all articles that have not gone through the peer review process. You will notice that our results page now includes mostly scholarly journals and trade publications. There are only a handful of magazine articles and no newspaper articles to be found. We can clear this filter by clicking the orange “x” to the right of “Peer reviewed”.

To limit our results to include only scholarly articles, I clicked the “Scholarly Journals” filter under “Source type” on the right side of the page. Our results list now contains only articles from peer reviewed, academic journals. To clear this filter, click the orange “x” next to “Scholarly Journals”, just as we did after applying the “Peer reviewed” filter.

Let’s say we are looking for articles from trade publications. Back under “Source type”, we just click on the “Trade Journals” filter. Our results list is now entirely made up of articles from trade publications. Click the orange “x” to clear this filter and return to the original results page.

We can choose to search for popular resources by selecting the “Newspapers” and “Magazines” filters under you guessed it, the Source type section on the right side of the page. Looking at our results page, we can see that our results consist of articles from magazines and newspapers.

Google Scholar/QU Journal Locator

Although the library’s databases are the best research tools, Google Scholar can also be used to search for articles. In most cases, you will not be able to access the full text version of an article, but you will be able to see the abstract and citation. Should you find an article that looks promising, you can plug the information from citation into the library’s Journal Locator to see if the full text article is available in our databases. You can also check to see if the article comes from a peer reviewed journal.

I used our “red meat” disease keyword combination to perform a search, and the results appear to contain a number of promising articles. However, you will notice that unlike Academic Search Premier and ProQuest, there are no filters that will allow us to limit our search to full text articles, peer reviewed articles, or articles from specific types of publications.

However, we are able to set up a custom date range, which will narrow down our results. I have also checked the box to “include citations”. This will provide us with a citation for an article in instances where even an abstract is unavailable.

By limiting our search to a specific date range, we have eliminated over half of the articles in our results list.

At first glance, this article appears to fit the scope of our research.

When we click on the link, we are directed to the ScienceDirect database. Since we only have guest access, we are only able to view the abstract and publication details for this article.

However, there is enough information here to use library’s journal locator to see if we are able to access the full text version of this article in one of the library databases.

First, we need to access the library’s home page. On the Quinnipiac home page, hover your mouse over the “Academics” link at the top of page, until the drop-down menu appears.

Select the “Arnold Bernhard Library” link from the list.

On the Arnold Bernhard Library home page, we need to locate the “Journals at Quinnipiac” link, which is found in the “Resources” section.

The “Resources” section is found in the middle of the page, between the “About the Library” and “Services” sections. The “Journals at Quinnipiac” link is the second link in the list.

This is the Journal and E-Book Locator. Here, we can check to see if the library has access to a specific journal or e-book. Records for journals will usually provide information such as the dates of coverage and which database or databases you can use to access articles from the journal. If you know that an article is from a peer reviewed journal, you can use the “Citation Linker” on this page to find the full text version of the article. However, since we are unsure about our journal, we need to check that first. Before we get started, I am going to click on the blue “Journals Only” tab up top to filter out all of the e-books.

Now that I am in the “Journals Only” tab, I am going to search for our publication title.

There is one record for Meat Science, and it looks like it can be accessed through the ScienceDirect database. Since the coverage period starts from 1995, we should be able to find our article, which was published in 2010. By entering the database through the library website, we should have full text access to the article. However, before we search for the article, we first want to check the journal title in Ulrichsweb to see if it is peer reviewed. We can do that by clicking the “Title details from ulrichsweb.com” link, found to the right of the journal title.