Academic Search Complete

Academic Search Complete is the library's biggest and most comprehensive database.

A database is just a big, digital collection of records with a search interface, allowing you to search a large collection of information quickly for records that match your search criteria.

In the case of Academic Search Complete and many of our other databases, the records are individual articles from printed magazines, newspapers, and journals (sometimes called 'academic journals' or 'scholarly journals'). In addition to articles, you'll also find images, reports, conference proceedings, book chapters, and more.

So instead of searching through one paper magazine at a time, you can search across literally millions of articles at once, using the database!

Let's say you have an assignment that requires you to find an article that fits certain conditions: published in a scholarly journal, published within the last five years, longer than 10 pages, etc. With Academic Search Complete, you can easily limit your search to make sure your results fit all of your assignment criteria.

Use the Limit Your Results' tab in this guide to find out how to use the Advanced Search screen to your advantage.

So you've done a search with keywords connected with Boolean operators, perhaps limited your results or tried some advanced search techniques, and the database has given you a list of search results. What do you do now?

The first thing to pay attention to is how many results your search returned. You can find it at the top of the results list. Anything more than 1000 results might be a signal that you need to refine your search some more. 

You can narrow down search results by adding keywords, setting limiters like Scholarly Journals or Publication Date, or using the advanced search to set even more refined limits.

Notice that search results are sorted by relevance: the articles the database believes are most relevant to your search terms are at the top of the list. If the date of your article is important to you, you can have the database sort your results by listing the newest articles first, or the oldest articles first. I've always wanted to see what they wrote about Ebola in 1995, haven't you?

The Academic Search Complete, as with all EBSCO databases, provides the citation for your articles. Look for this symbol when viewing your article:

Clicking on the Cite icon will summon a pop up that will give a choice of, at this time, nine citation styles. Click on your chosen citation style and then Copy to Clipboard, then navigate to your Works Cited (MLA format); References (APA format); or Bibliography (Chicago Style) page and paste the citation.

Database citations are created by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The AI system is not getting graded on your citations, you are! Please check any citations you retrieve from the databases against instructions and guides your instructors give you or ask a librarian to make certain there are no errors.

Always check database generated citations after you paste them into your paper to make certain that the font and size of font match the rest of your paper and that the citations are double spaced if necessary.