Feedback Form
| More


1. Go to http://www.bakeru.edu/library2.

2. To find a journal article you will be using the tools located under the heading "Find Articles & More." The best place to begin your search for a journal article is with the "Start with Databases" link.		 1

3. Next, you can choose a database alphabetically or by subject. Click on the Education subject link.		 2

4. The new page provides a list of the databases that are accessible through Collins Library. A great database to start with is the Education Resource Information Center (ERIC). Click on the first ERIC link		 3

5. On the ERIC homepage click on the Advance Search link		 4

6. If I just conduct a search for the keyword violence, I will receive 11,957 results. In order to conduct a more precise search, the articles in ERIC have been assigned descriptors, or words that describe the main topic(s) of the articles. You can search with descriptors by changing the first dropdown box to “descriptors” and clicking on the “Use thesaurus to help find descriptors" link.		 5

7. The resulting page will allow you to search for descriptors. If I search for violence, five results related to violence appear. Some of the results are synonyms, which are NOT descriptors. Instead these records provide a Use Term, which is a real descriptor. For instance, the Student Violence link has a use term listed, violence.  If I click on violence, I will see that broader, narrower, and related terms are provided to improve my search. Once you find a descriptor (indicated by the word Main in the record type field), click on the “Start an ERIC search” button. Your term will be added to the search box. If I conduct the search at this point, I have reduced my results from 11,957 to 7,504. NOTE: Sometimes you might use a keyword when a descriptor is not descriptive enough…for instance No Child Left Behind is not a descriptor and legislation is too broad of a descriptor for my search, so instead I might do a keyword search for No Child Left Behind.




 6
7
8



8. If you still have too many results (as we do), you will want to think about what subtopic within violence we actually want to search. For instance, we could just focus on Zero Tolerance Policy for violent acts in schools. We can combine search terms using boolean operators. You will notice a dropdown with the word AND selected. As is, this will combine the terms entered in the first and second search boxes, returning results that cover both topics. You can also change this option to OR, which would return results that cover either topic 1 or topic 2. Finally, you can select NOT, which will return only results on topic 1 that do not include topic 2. For our example, we only want results that cover both topics, so we will use the AND operator.

9. In the second field on our search page we can change the dropdown to descriptors and search the thesaurus again (as we did in steps 6 and 7) for zero tolerance.

10. Upon entering the relevant descriptor and clicking on the search button, we get 58 results (much better than the 11,957 results of our first search).

11. If you still have too many results, go back and use the limiter features at the bottom of the search page. For instance, you might select only articles about Elementary Education (by selecting the option under Education Level).


9

12. Upon narrowing your results to an acceptable number to browse through, you can browse the records to learn more about the various articles and documents. You can also look at the descriptor field to learn about other relevant descriptors for future searches.

13. You will notice that some records include fulltext (marked with the PDF icon) and some do not. For records that do not include fulltext, copy the source field and open a new browser tab to the library homepage (as directed in Step 1).		 10

14. Under the Find Articles & More heading, click on Find a Journal. 		11

15. Paste the journal title into the search box and click search. 		12

16. On the results page determine which database has your journal available in fulltext. You can do this by looking at the date range for access, located after the word fulltext. If an embargo is marked, this means that the most recent issues are not available for the timeframe indicated. When you find a database that has fulltext access to a journal, click on the database name.		 13

17. On the resulting screen browse down to the issue that has your article in it.		 14

18. Browse down the list until you find the article you are looking for and click on the fulltext link.
 15