Academic Search Premier – Getting Started
To begin a search for articles, start at www.nypl.org:
Once at our homepage, simply click on “databases.” The following page should appear:
Under Databases by Subject we want to click on History and Social Sciences. This will generate a list of all the History databases offered by NYPL. The databases are all organized alphabetically, so the link for Academic Search Premier will be near the top of this list–click on this!:
This is the basic search screen for Academic Search Premier:
Search Options
We’re going to continue our search by first clicking on the Advanced Search tab to provide us with added options and precision with our search terms:
Advanced Search options:
With Advanced Search, we can chose the exact precision of our search terms.
SU Subject searches yield the best results, but demand that our keywords match up exactly with the article’s assigned subject headings.
AB Abstract searches cast a wider net and retrieve more articles, however our results might not be quite as precise as with a subject search.
Select a Field will look for our terms anywhere within the article, which is identical to a typical “keyword” search.
As a general strategy, first try a SU Subject search, then an AB Abstract search and if you are still not retrieving results, finish with a Select a Field search. After settling on your terms, simply click the Search button.
Here are sample results for a Subject search on “George W. Bush”:
Reviewing an Article
Here is a sample citation:
This article provides us with full text access. That is, we can read the entire article right here. The link for HTML Full Text reproduces the article’s text.
Looking at a sample article:
1. This contains all of the information about the article for your Works Cited, or Bibliography. The title, author and journal information will always be found here.
2. Here we find all of the Subject Terms that are discussed within the article. Often these subjects can provide a clue for additional searches related to your topic. The subjects are all links–clicking on them will generate another search for articles.
3. This is the article’s abstract. The abstract offers a brief description of the article’s contents. If you ever perform an abstract search, this is where Academic Search Premier looks for its matching search terms.
4. Finally we see the start of the article’s text.
Citation Only, No Full Text
While Academic Search Premier offers a wealth of full-text materials, some times you will encounter citations that look like this:
This citation is simply an abstract. That is, Academic Search Premier is informing us that this article exists out there somewhere in library land, and you are welcome to go track it down, but the database is not offering full text of this material at this time.
What to do?
If we wanted to read this article, we would need to either 1. Find another database that offers full text of The Nation (and the library does offer such a database; to discover what titles are covered in all of our databases, you will want to investigate the Electronic Journal Portal). or 2. Locate the original, physical copy of the journal. You can do journal searches with the Branch Libraries through LEO or the Research Libraries with CATNYP.
“Can I take this article with me?”
At the top of our article, we have the ability to Print, E-Mail, or Save our source:
Print: You can print articles from the library. Every day the library grants you 10 free pages of printing. If your article(s) exceed 10 pages, you will need to purchase a copy card to cover the difference.
E-mail: You can email an entire article right to your inbox. This is often the simplest and most efficient way to reproduce an article.
Save: You also can save the article to a removable storage device. At the library, only flash drive (i.e. junk drives, memory sticks…) are recognized.
