Welcome to our Education Abstracts tutorial!
In July of 2005, we switched database providers for Wilson. All of the full-text articles that were previously available through ERIC now appear in Education Abstracts.
If you're an education student or faculty member, this is an important database to know.
First, we start at the library's home page:
http://library.cortland.edu
Under "Find Articles," click on the "by Subject" tag.
Click on "Education."
Finally, click on "Education Abstracts."
This screen might look intimidating at first, but it gives you a lot of power in your searches. Let's walk through it.
For our search, let's do something tough - peer-reviewed articles on literature circles or reading circles. That way, you'll be sure that most of your searches will be easy.
Under this tab is a long selection of possible searches you can run - subject, title, author, and many more.
"All-Smart Search" will look in all of these, but if you want a particular author or article, you can use this to cut down the results.
Here's the search. We can use quotation marks around words to search for an exact phrase.
Our search results can be organized in a number of ways.
"Relevance" is a good one for our current search, so we'll keep it as it is.
We can also limit the search to a particular year, if we want.
For this search, we won't need that.
Here's a list of the document types available.
We want journal articles. In this database, they're called "Feature articles," so we'll pick that option from the menu.
You won't use "physical description" a lot. Still, it's good if you want to find documents with a chart or an annotated bibliography on a topic.
If we want to limit our search to full text articles, we should click this box.
Before we click on this, you need to know that this just searches the full-text articles in Wilson. If the magazine is in another library database, it will not show up with this search. We'll show you later how to find those.
PDF (or Portable Document Format) files are also known as Acrobat files. They are an image of the original page, complete with page numbers and illustrations.
Peer-reviewed documents have been sent out to experts in a field for opinions before they are published.
We know we want peer-reviewed documents for our search.
You can also search within the full text of articles in this database. This can give a long list of results with little that's important, though. We'll skip it for now.
So, that's a search for full-text peer-reviewed articles within this database on literature circles or reading circles. Let's see what it turns up.
Here's our result list. Many of these results look good. We'll examine one more closely in a minute.
When you see this symbol next to a document, it means that the document is available in HTML (Web) format.
This symbol gives you a PDF, or Adobe Acrobat, version of the document.
This little hat means the article is peer-reviewed. We ran a search for peer-reviewed documents, so all of them should have this symbol.
FindIt links to the library's SFX system.
This allows you to search for documents in other databases, request documents we don't have through interlibrary loan, or create a formatted reference for your paper.
If you see this, it means that one of the databases you are searching is full of users - in this case, Education Index Retro.
We don't need that one, so we're fine.
Now let's see one of these articles.
I think I can use this. Let me see if I can get it in HTML format.
This one looks good.
I could print it out using the "Print" option on my browser.
Let me close this and show you something else.
Now, let's look at the same document in PDF.
You can save or print this document with this toolbar.
Remember - if you're in the library, use the "Print" button, and not the "Print" from the pulldown menu!
Next, we'll talk about how to email yourself a document.
On the left is a "Print Email Save" button. Click on it.
(You need to be on this screen for your document to use this button. It won't work from the list of search results.)
"Wait!" you might say. "Why did you tell me to print from the other menus, instead of going here?"
Wilson isn't perfect. It may not format documents the way you want, and it won't print PDF from this screen.
Click on "Email Options."
All we have to do is fill in our address and a subject, just to make sure we don't delete it accidentally.
Here's our confirmation that the email is on its way.
Using the "Back to Results" button at the bottom, we can return to our search.
That's all for now. Happy searching, and don't forget to ask a librarian if you need assistance.