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Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to this brief tutorial that will show you how to find current, peer reviewed articles, case studies, and other types of documents in the field of business using the library’s database ABI/Inform Complete.
To get there, start at the library’s homepage (libraries.wichita.edu) and click on the link “electronic resources” on the left side of the screen.
You will see that ABI/Inform is near the top of the list. If you click on this link from home, at this point you will be prompted to type in your WSU ID and password.
When you open ABI/Inform it automatically takes you to the advanced search screen, which is exactly where you want to be.
Now you can start adding your search terms. Let’s search for “social media”. Since that’s a two word phrase I put quotes around it to search for both words together. We can narrow the search by adding more terms, like “marketing” OR “advertising”.
If you need to, you can add more boxes for any other aspect of the topic that interests you.
You may want to explore all the documents in the database, but since many searches bring back tens of thousands of results, it can be a good idea to select only one type of document to browse at a time. Here, you can use the advanced search filters to find only the type of information you need.
If you need peer-reviewed or scholarly sources, check the box for “peer-review” first to ensure all of your results have gone through this process.
You may also be interested in finding only the most current information, so you can select a specific range of dates. For instance, under publication date we will select “Specific date range” and type in 2010 to 2015.
Finally, you will want to tell the database what kind of documents to search for. Scroll down to the document type box. Depending on your project, useful documents types may include: articles, case studies, industry reports, market reports, or newspapers. Keep in mind that some document types, such as newspapers, don’t go through the peer review process, so if you don’t receive many results you may need to deselect “peer review” above.
Let’s take a look at “case studies” and hit search.
Now hit Search. You can see we have 263 results, which is a very reasonable number.
From the results list there are a couple things to know. First, you can click on preview to read the article’s abstract and quickly find out if it’s relevant to you before you even open it up.
If the article is relevant to you, you will want to access the full-text of the article. For many articles you’ll see it says Full-text and that means you can click on this link and the whole article will open up so you can read it, save it to your computer, or print it out. However, sometimes you will find it says “Link to Full Text”, which could mean one of two things. Either the library subscribes to that journal but it’s kept in a different database, or it’s a journal the library simply doesn’t subscribe to. If you click the link “360 Link to Full Text” you will find out which it is.
If we have the article in another database this link will open up the full-text in a new window. If we don’t own the article the page will tell you that no full-text is available and you will see a link to submit a request through interlibrary loan, which means we can order the article from another college for free to you. For more information about interlibrary loan please see our tutorial video.
That’s all I wanted to share with you today. If you have any questions, please come by the reference desk or contact a librarian.
Thank you for watching.
