Robbins Library Notes

This week’s review examines Academic Search Premier (ASP), one of the many EBSCOhost databases.

What it is

ASP “provides citations and abstracts for articles from over 4,140 journals, and includes full text from over 3,170 journals,” as the HOLLIS record notes.

Strengths

• Humanities & Social Sciences Emphasis — ASP’s focus is primarily in the humanities and social sciences, as well as popular publications like Time and Newsweek.

• Current Coverage — For the most part, ASP provides full-text of current issues of journals, i.e., those from the present back to the mid-1990s, and even earlier, in some cases. However, this is not always the case, as we see in the Limitation section.

Limitation

• Embargo on Current Issues – At the request of individual publishers, full-text of recent publications may be embargoed from release for a certain period of time (generally six to twelve months previous to the current date.) If this is the case, you will be able to retrieve a bibliographic record, but not the full-text, until the issue in question falls outside of the time-frame set by the publisher. The journals Inquiry and Philosophical Studies are examples of journals with a twelve-month embargo on current issues.

Using Academic Search Premier

ASP has three search screens. Two of these, the Basic Search and the Advanced Search, are most relevant for philosophy-related research.

Below the tabs for the three search screens are six sub-tabs: Keyword, Publications, Subject Terms, Cited References, Indexes, and Images. We’ll look at the first five of these below, once I’ve gone over how to use the Advanced Search Screen.

As noted above, there are two search screens that most concern us here:

• The Basic Search, as with many databases, is useful for general, broad searches.

• The Advanced Search, which is the default search screen, is the one that I recommend using, since it gives you better control over the search with the use of limiters. Several things to note about the Advanced Search:
  • Default Search — The default search searches only the title, abstract, subject headings, and author fields. It does not search full-text unless you set the search box drop-down menu to “TX All Text.”
  • Refine Search Box – The Refine Search box under the search fields is very helpful, and I recommend using it when setting up searches.
    • Checking off the “Full Text” box will return only full-text articles.
    • Checking off the “Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals” box will eliminate popular publications, limiting the search to only academic journals.
    • The “Publication Type” and “Document Type” menus are also useful — setting the former to “periodical” and the latter to “article” can sometimes eliminate things like book reviews and other potentially irrelevant items.
  • One thing about which to be careful: In the “Refine Search” area, there are two “Reset” buttons, positioned in places where, in other databases, you might expect a “Search” button. Be careful to not click these unless you want to modify your search. It’s an annoying quirk of ASP that these buttons are placed where they are, and that the “Search” button is not more prominently displayed.

• Sub-tab Searching – I mentioned above that there are six sub-tabs under the Basic and Advanced Search Tabs. We’ll look at the first five of these, as they are most relevant for our needs.
  • Keyword — This is the default search option, using words and phrases entered into the search boxes.
  • Publications – If you want to see if a journal is in ASP, or if full-text is available, you have the option to search for the journal, or to browse through an alphabetical list, in order to view the complete bibliographic record.
  • Subject Terms — Subject term searching can be very useful in searching. ASP has an extensive thesaurus of subject terms that are linked to the records in the database. These terms can be used as limiters in a search, e.g., searching “reasons” and “desires” in “TX All Text,” and “philosophy” in “SU Subject Terms”. Or, you can browse through the subject terms, to see what articles are linked to them. You also have the option of exploding term, i.e., expanding it to the next higher term in the subject hierarchy, if you are returning too few results with a narrow term.
  • Cited References — Use this option to see how many times an article or author has been cited in other articles in ASP. This can help you determine which articles are more relevant or important to certain topics.
    
  • Indexes – If you would like to see how many articles by an author are in ASP, use this option. In “Browse an Index,” choose “Author;” enter in a name (last first, then initial or full first name), and click “Browse.” You’ll be able to add the author to your search, if you’d like to do so.

In Summary

• ASP is an excellent database in which to find current issues of journals.
• It is best used in conjunction with databases like JSTOR, Synergy, and Project MUSE, to cover a wide range of current and classic articles and journal issues.

Next week’s database review will examine Synergy, the platform used to access Blackwell’s journals.