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Communication & Mass Media Complete is a database that collects research articles on communication and mass media.
It's useful for papers in any discipline on topics that involve the transmission of ideas or problems in communicating.
Communication & Mass Media Complete is one of the EBSCO databases, which means the interface and the way you search in it
is going to be basically the same as any other EBSCO database.
On the opening page of the database you can set up your search.
Two buttons that you may use are the Linked Full Text (recommended to be used when your assignment is due within a week),
and the Peer Review button (used when a professor requires Peer Reviewed articles.)
Once you've set your options, you can search using the box above. Enter your search terms in the box.
At the end of this tutorial, there's a link to a tutorial on how to construct a good search.
The number of articles that your search found is listed in the center next to "Search Results"
You can use the buttons on the left to narrow down that number; select the options that apply to your search
(such as the range of publication dates or the type of publication) and wait for the update. The subjects are particularly useful for this because
they are tags that describe the article: when you search for keywords, you are just finding articles with those words written in them.
If you don't like your results after using any limit, just click on the little X next to that limit and the database will remove it from the search.
To learn more about an article, click on its title.
This brings us to the full record, which provides a lot of information.
At the top you will find the citation information, including the article title and author.
The source line contains the journal title, volume number, issue number and page numbers of the article.
All of this information will be important when you complete your bibliography.
There're a couple of ways to get a sense of what a particular article is about before you read the actual article.
The subject terms are tags that describe the actual subject of the article; they are the same tags that you saw earlier in the limits on the left.
The abstract is a short summary of the article. Skimming the abstract is the best method of finding whether an article is relevant to you.
There are two places you can look to find the full text of an article. If you are in the full record, look on the upper left side of the page.
If you are in the list of articles, look at the bottom of each record.
If there is a “Full Text” link under the title, click the link to read the entire article.
The PDF Full Text link will provide a scanned copy of the original article.
If the article is not available in full text, choose the link labeled “request through interlibrary loan.”
The library staff will try to find the article for you in another library.
There are a couple of useful buttons on the right side of the article screen. In particular, you can email an article to yourself,
and if full text is available it will come as an attachment with the email. You can automatically get the citation for an article
(though you should double check it for correctness), and you can click the folder icon to save the article online.
For details on how to use the folder, searching strategies, and more, click on these links.