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What's here 4. What's available via Google |
Name_____________________________ To get to this page on the Internet:
Electronic books The library offers an extraordinary collection of electronic books, currently numbering about 18,000. The amazing thing is that you can search for words used inside of all those thousands of book. This is a great approach to getting very specific information about narrow topics. The easiest way to get access to them:
The primary periodical databases available at the Cabrillo College Library for this course are grouped together:
In the world of periodicals, there are both magazines and journals. Magazines are popular, written for broad audiences. Journals are peer-reviewed (articles are submitted to journal editors who send them to academic peers in the discipline who review them) and written for academic audiences. When you use Academic Search Premier, you want to click to go to the Advanced Search mode:
You can click to limit your search to full text. You can also limit the search to academic journals -- peer reviewed articles.
Here's a sample search for articles in Academic Search Premier for articles about drug use among athletes:
Once you have the results list on your screen, click on an article title to get full information about the article. Then, note that you can click to email it, and even to cite it!!
When you click to email yourself an article, you can click to have an APA formatted citation included:
Use Academic Search Premier to look for an article on your topic
Look for an article on your topic. What did you find?
CINAHL Plus is another good database for you to use. CINAHL stands for Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature -- it's the major periodicals database for nursing and allied health. MEDLINE is another major medical database for you to use. Like the nursing database, it is available via EBSCOhost. Medline is also available free online from the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Medline is the world's largest database for medical science. The articles you retrieve may be quite technical in nature. Most will not be available full text. But, you can limit your search to just the full text, as shown below. The search interface there is different
Here's a sample search -- note that the box next to Links to free full text has been checked.
If you find information about an article that is not available full text in the database you are using, ask at the Reference Desk for an interlibrary loan -- we'll find a library that has it and will get a photocopy for you. Sometimes this process that can take a week to ten days, so it's good to plan ahead.
Google has a database for (mostly) periodical articles -- it's called Scholar. The URL to get there directly is scholar.google.com, or you can switch over to it by clicking on More once you're in Google. By now there is enough good and often full text material in Scholar that it is worth a look. Here's a sample search:
Note how you can search for recent articles by setting the date option box.
We all use Google as our primary search engine. It's the biggest, the most innovative, and the best search engine. Really. The big news about Google is that it now performs what it calls universal searches -- it will search several of its databases simultaneously. From now on, you don't just have to know you're using Google, you have to know where in Google you are. ; -) Here is a search on Google. Note that it's a Web search. However, in this search result, Google is saying: wow! besides the Web stuff, there are some books you may want to look at on this topic. Sweet!
Google is digitizing millions of books from 37 libraries -- all of Stanford, all of Harvard, all of University of California, all of Oxford University in England and 23 other large, beautiful libraries. Description and timeline of the Google Book Project. Robot digitizer used by Stanford. Every single page in every book is being digitized, but not every page of every book is available -- yet. There's a publishers' lawsuit that restricts access to recently published titles. But information wants to be free, I think, and it will eventually work out. Even at this stage, there are vast amounts of full text available that it is useful to explore. To go to Google books directly, it's books.google.com.
The Web is an open publishing environment. Anyone can publish, and sometimes it seems as though everyone does! It is very important to evaluate what you find. In searching the Web, you want to use resources that are not only recent and relevant to your topic, but that are also based on reliable, quality information resources. A savvy Web user on medical topics will know about and use these sources:
Let's do a little investigation ourselves about magnet therapy.
There are lots of places to get images on the Web. Here are two of the better collections: There are lots of places to get access to videos on the Web. The biggest, with the best quality videos is Blinkx.com.
You can use Google Books to look up chapters in books about researching and writing papers. Here are some suggestions:
Also available in the Cabrillo Library's electronic book collection is The Research Project: How to Write It -- Routledge Study Guides; 5th Ed. by Berry, Ralph. London Taylor & Francis Routledge, 2004. To get to the NetLibrary ebooks:
Getting to this page on the Internet
A. Steiner; T. N. Smalley rev. 9/09 |
