UC MERCED LIBRARY TUTORIALS
Using Academic Search Complete
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If you are off campus you will need to connect to the campus network with the VPN before starting this tutorial.
http://library.ucmerced.edu/use/technology/vpn
This tutorial will show you how to use Academic Search Complete, a popular library database.
Use the active webpage on your right to complete the tutorial.
Academic Search Complete is an easy-to-use search tool that can help you find information on a wide variety of topics. Articles from newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals are available in Academic Search Complete. Using Academic Search Complete and other library databases can save you time and frustration!
To access the Academic Search Complete database:
Searches that are not too broad yield the best results. Let's say you are researching a broad topic like plagiarism. How could you narrow that down? Add additional concepts like who, what, where.
Now, combine these concepts to ask a research question. For example:
Do college students who plagiarize have higher GPAs than those who don't?
It's a good idea to brainstorm for other potential terminology for each concept. For example:
plagiarism OR copying
college OR university
student OR undergraduate
GPA OR grades
The list of articles you see in your results list could come from:
Use the icons next to the titles to determine article types.
If your results list is too large, narrow it down using limiter options on the left like Publication Date, Source Types, and Subject: Thesaurus Terms.
What is an abstract?
The article record may not include the full text of the article. However, there are several ways to access full text:
What is Interlibrary Loan?
WARNING! Clicking UC-eLinks now will take you to a new tab and you will lose these tutorial instructions. You might want to wait and try this later.
Academic Search Complete (and most other databases) have tools that can help make your research more efficient. For example, the database tools can help you:
To find additional articles on the same topic:
To save, print, email, cite, or link back to articles:
This concludes the Using Academic Search Complete tutorial. Now that you've finished:
Thank you!
What is your faculty instructor's name?
What does UC-eLinks help you to do?
Choose the BEST answer to this question. Which of these features are supported in Academic Search Complete?
Please enter your name and email address to retrieve a copy of your completed quiz.
You can enter multiple email addresses separated by commas, with no spaces (for example, bobcat@email.com,bobcat2@email.com). If you are doing this for a class, you may need to enter your instructor's email address also. Note: It could take up to 10 seconds to generate the certificate. Please do not click the Print/Send button more than once.