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Welcome to the tutorial for Academic Onefile. This is a general database, meaning that it covers a wide variety of subjects,
and is intended to be the first stop in your research. The tutorial will explain the basic features of Academic Onefile,
show you a sample search, and go over how to obtain full text articles.
This is the front page of the database, where you can set up your search. These tabs allow you to search for different things.
Keyword searching should be your default choice; each of the other tabs is used for specific types of searches.
Subject searching is used when you know the exact subject term that the database uses to describe your topic.
Publication title is used when you want to browse in a journal on your subject.
Entire document is designed for copying and pasting sentences so you can figure out what document they came from.
Below the tab are three options, two of which are frequently useful: Documents with full text allows you to see only full text sources,
but if you are doing extended research this is a bad idea because it reduces your access to articles you could order for free.
Peer-reviewed publications limits your results to peer-reviewed documents, which is useful for upper level papers.
Let’s do a search in the database: use key terms from your research question, and separate each concept with “and”.
This is the results page. You can see your number of results in the center here;
the goal of your search usually is to get that number down to a manageable amount.
There're several ways to reduce the number of results; the easiest is to put more search terms into the “Search within results” bar,
This searches the stuff you’ve already found to narrow it down further.
You choose the types of articles you see; this is useful when your assignment requires specific types of sources.
The related subjects area lets you narrow down your search using terms that describe the content of the article,
as opposed to the keywords we’ve been using, which just look for the word to appear anywhere in the article or the title.
This is one of the most effective ways to focus in on a specific topic.
The Document Types allows you to get rid of non-relevant types of articles like book reviews, and instead just to focus on the articles.
The publication dates area is also very useful for getting the most up to date information.
Click on the custom date range to look for articles older than a year.
Once you have a good list of relevant articles, click on an article title to get more information about it.
There're several options on this screen. You can read the article in HTML format on the page, if available.
You can view it as a PDF or download it using the buttons on the right.
You can also get citation information by clicking on the citation tools button on the right, and then selecting either APA or MLA format.
Remember to double check these citations against your Manual to make sure that they are accurate.
The full text of the articles is also reacheable on the main search screen, under the record.
These are the basic tools you need to start using Academic OneFile. If you have any more questions,
you can contact the Reference Librarians by calling 897-8256, or emailing us at askrivref@rivier.edu.
You can also contact us during normal business hours by using the chatbox that's in this LibGuide or on the library page.