Article Databases
Full Text Database - Keyword Search the Full Text of the Articles
- Scopus This link opens in a new windowIndexes articles and analyzes citations from 20,000+ journals in the sciences and social sciences back to 1970, though some are as far back as 1788. Search this database in lieu of Web of Science.
- SpringerLink This link opens in a new windowArticles from journals that are mainly scientific and medical back to 1997 with indexing for additional journals, books, and protocols. Includes ebooks in the field of education.
Biomedical Articles
- MEDLINE (EBSCOhost) -- 1946-present This link opens in a new windowComprehensive index to all aspects of medicine, covering journals and some titles include full-text.
- PubMed -- 1946-present This link opens in a new window
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Comprehensive index to all aspects of medicine back to 1946. Freely available from the National Library of Medicine, PubMed includes all MEDLINE content, plus additional selected biomedical sources. Look for the "Check for Full Text at EWU" button within individual PubMed records.
Environmental Sciences Articles
- GreenFILE (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowIndexes journals and magazines (along with selected books, pamphlets and government reports) relating to human impacts on the environment.
Education Articles - Aimed at K-12 Teachers
- Education Research Complete (EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new windowJournals and magazines along with books and conference papers. Coverage dates vary, but a few titles go back to 1975.
- ERIC: Educational Resources Information Center (U.S. Dept. of Education) -- 1966-present This link opens in a new window
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Free, government-sponsored version of this comprehensive database for education, indexing journals and magazines, as well as books, videos, conference papers and technical reports. Recent ERIC Documents are linked to full text online.
Searching Advice
Phrasing Your Search
Stick to concrete keywords and use scientific terminology. Scientific articles tend to have all the key terms in the title, author supplied keywords, and the abstract.
Boolean operators allow you to combine words or phrases in specific ways.
- AND requires that all words be present in the retrieved articles.
- OR allows any of the words to be present in the retrieved articles. Use for synonyms of words.
- NOT requires that the word is not present in any of the retrieved articles. Use with extreme caution because it can eliminate relevant articles.
Truncation allows you to search for words beginning with specific characters.
Our databases use an asterisk (*) to truncate.
ex: nutri* retrieves nutrition, nutritional, nutritive, nutrient, nutrients
Be careful truncating short words.
ex: cat* retrieves cat, cats, category, catastrophe, catacylsmic, etc.
Phrase searching keeps words together as a phrase. Many databases assume the Boolean "and" between words unless you indicate otherwise, usually by putting double quotes around the phrase.
ex: "cover crop"
Narrowing Your Results
The best way to narrow your results is to use very specific, concrete terms. Rather than soil nutrients in general, search by the specific nutrient(s).
If you don't have a particular nutrient in mind, then you can try narrowing the field the search term appears. Try narrowing to the title of the article. The default searches the entire record: title, abstract, subjects/keywords. Unfortunately, you cannot narrow by the author-supplied keywords in Web of Science.
By Date
- Biological Science Database goes back to the 1960s
- Web of Science goes back to 1985
By Subject or Categories
- ProQuest databases have subject tags on the left side.
- Web of Science has Categories, or scientific disciplines. You can narrow the ones that apply, or exclude the ones that don't apply.
Which articles are the most important?
Web of Science excels in this, because you can re-sort your results by Times Cited. The articles that others cited the most frequently rise to the top.