Academic Search Premier Tips

Academic Search Premier is a multi-disciplinary database that indexes over 8,000 journals and includes the full text of nearly 4,600 of those journals.

The default search searches for words contained in the article title, subject headings, author, and abstract. To limit your search, you can select any one field listed in the drop down menu beside the search boxes. You can also limit your search to full text , scholarly (peer reviewed) journals , date, document type, and other criteria. To expand your search, you can select to search in the field all text (located in the drop down menu)

While Academic Search Premier offers the full text for many journals, only citations are given for some journals. If you need an article from one of these journals, use our interlibrary loan form It typically takes between one and three weeks to receive the articles. To limit your results to only articles that contain the full text, check the "Full Text" box under "Limit Your Results."

Academic Search Premier automatically searches exact phrases. For example, the search anorexia bulimia will retrieve few results because it is only retrieving articles with anorexia and bulimia written side by side. To avoid phrase searching, you must link your search terms together using the following search operators: AND, OR, NOT. Academic Search Premier also allows you to search for word variations by using the symbols * and ? . For complex searches, you can group and order your terms using parentheses.

AND

Searches for both search terms For example, the search children AND depression retrieves articles that contain both terms children and depression .

OR

Searches for either search term For example, the search college OR university retrieves articles that contain either term college or university .

NOT

Searches for articles that contain only one of the search terms For example, the search anorexia NOT bulimia searches for only anorexia , any articles that contain the term bulimia will not be included. Be careful with this search operator, many times relevant articles will be excluded.

*

Replaces an unlimited number of letters For example, teen* retrieves teen , teens , teenager , teenagers , etc. This only works at the end of a word in this database.

?

Replaces a single letter Wom?n retrieves woman and/or women .

( )

Groups and orders search terms For example, bully* AND (adolescen* OR teen*) retrieves articles with both bully* and adolescen* or articles with both bully* and teen*.