Resource of the Week

The Ed/ITLib Digital Library for Education and Information Technology is a valuable online resource of peer-reviewed and published international journal articles and proceedings papers on the latest research, developments, and applications related to all aspects of Educational Technology and E-Learning. This database is sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.

Within the database are user-created collections of papers, generally grouped together by a theme or topic called binders. You can create your own binder, or browse through binders created by other Digital Library users.

Search tips:

• Phrase Searching: Search for phrases by enclosing search terms in quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") will appear together in all results exactly as you have entered them. For example “distance learning” will retrieve all articles where the word distance appears immediately before the word learning.

• Case sensitive searching: This can be useful for searching acronyms and names. A search for Bell will not find bell. A search for USE will not find use.

• Wildcards: The * symbol can be used at the end of any word stem to represent any ending. For example teach* will retrieve teacher, teaching and teach. The ? can be used within a word to represent a character. For example vir??al will retrieve words beginning with vir and ending with al with any two characters between.

Where is it: Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter E and select EdITLib Digital Library for Information Technology and Education

Quick Link: http://ezproxy.library.unlv.edu/login?url=http://www.aace.org/dl

The ComAbstracts database contains abstracts of articles and books published in the primary professional literature of the communication(s) field as well as bibliographic records and audio materials. It is an OpenURL-enabled database of sources relevant to researchers, scholars, and students interested in fields related to human communication studies (mass communication, human interaction, rhetoric, health communication, communication and new media, journalism, communication history, etc.)

ComAbstracts is expanded and updated throughout the year.

Search tips:

• Wildcard searches. The asterisk (*) is a wildcard. Attach an asterisk to a search term and it matches any text that follows. For example: searching for "rhet*" matches "rhetorical", "rhetoric", "rhetoric of science", etc.
  
• Conflation. Use the squiggle or tilde (~) character to find forms of a word. This is different than in wildcard searches. For example, searching for "post~" will find "post", "posted", "posts", "posting" but not "post-haste", "post mortem", or "postulate". These latter three terms would be matched with a wildcard search for "post*" but not with a conflation search for "post~". Beware, however, that there are limits to the capabilities of conflation searches. They cannot find all grammatical forms. For example, searching for "hold~", will match "holding" and "holds" but will not match "held".
  
• Word proximity. Placing a number between forward slashes indicates that the search terms must be located within so many words of each other. For example, "organizational /10/ network" would return only those items that contain the word "organizational" within ten words of the word "network".
  
• Items located in a search result can be saved in a temporary user folder. This feature permits collection of items across searches for different terms. The collection saved in the folder can be downloaded in plain text or in RIS format for direct incorporation into reference software such as Refworks. Items from the folder can also be emailed to a recipient address. Click on add items to folder. This folder will disappear after sixty minutes of inactivity.

Where is it:

Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter C and select ComAbstracts.

Quick Link:
http://ezproxy.library.unlv.edu/login?url=http://www.cios.org/www/absrch.htm

CINAHL provides indexing for over 2,931 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health. The database contains more than 1,000,000 records dating back to 1981. It offers complete coverage of English-language nursing journals and publications from the National League for Nursing and the American Nurses’ Association, CINAHL covers nursing, biomedicine, health sciences librarianship, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and 17 allied health disciplines.

Examples of titles offered in CINAHL include: AANA Journal, California Hospitals, Gastroenterology Nursing, Maternal and Child Health Journal, Paediatric Nursing, Parents, etc. In addition, this database offers access to health care books, nursing dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of practice, educational software, audiovisuals and book chapters. Searchable cited references for more than 1,200 journals are also included.

Full text material includes 70 journals plus legal cases, clinical innovations, critical paths, drug records, research instruments and clinical trials.

Search tips:

• The CINAHL Subject Headings authority file is a controlled vocabulary thesaurus that assists in more effectively searching the CINAHL database. Each bibliographic reference in the database is associated with a set of subject terms that are assigned to describe the content of an article. There are more than 10,600 main subject headings as well as thousands of cross-references that assist in finding the most appropriate subject heading. CINAHL subject heading terms are arranged in a hierarchy, or "tree structure", that permits searching at various levels of detail from the most general level to more narrow levels to find the most precise terms. The headings can be exploded to retrieve all references indexed to that term as well as all references indexed to any narrower term(s). Searches can also be limited with specific qualifiers (subheadings) to improve the precision of the search, and limited to major subject headings indicate the main focus of an article. To search these subject headings click on the words CINAHL Headings in the green bar near the top of the page.

• The wildcard is represented by a question mark ?. To use the wildcard, enter your search terms and replace each unknown character with a ?. EBSCOhost finds all citations of that word with the ? replaced by a letter. For example, type ne?t to find all citations containing neat, nest or next. Truncation is represented by an asterisk (*). To use truncation, enter the root of a search term and replace the ending with an *. EBSCOhost finds all forms of that word. For example, type comput* to find the words computer or computing.

• To export items to the RefWorks software, click on add to folder by the items you want to include. When you are ready to export them to RefWorks, click on the word folder at the top of the page. Then click on the word export and select direct export to RefWorks. Finally, click on the word save. This will open a window to allow you to log in to your RefWorks account and complete the export.

Quick Link: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=ehost&defaultdb=cin20

BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate open access to peer-reviewed biomedical research. All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.

All research articles in BioMed Central's journals receive rapid and thorough peer review. The detailed peer-review policy of each journal is the responsibility of the journal editor(s) concerned. Many journals operate traditional anonymous peer review. Others, including the medical BMC-series titles, operate 'open peer review', in which reviewers are asked to sign their reviews. For these titles, the pre-publication history of each paper (including submitted versions, reviewers' reports and authors' responses) is linked to from the published article. BioMed Central's portfolio of 186 journals includes general titles such as Journal of Biology alongside specialist journals (e.g. BMC Bioinformatics, Malaria Journal) that focus on particular disciplines.

All the research published by BioMed Central's journals is open access, but BioMed Central also provides access to various additional products and services that require a subscription. For example, certain BioMed Central journals such as Genome Biology publish commissioned review content available only to subscribers. Other subscription-only products include Faculty of 1000, a literature evaluation service that covers both biology and medicine. BioMed Central also operates Open Repository, a hosted digital repository solution for institutions.

Search tips:

• Click on the advanced search tab located near the top of the page. Type your search terms in the four empty boxes, one or more per box. With the menus at the left of each box you can restrict to a specific field: author, title etc. The menus at the right determine what happens if the box contains more than one word. All words: will return articles that contain all words, anywhere in the requested field. Any word: will return articles that contain at least one of the words in the requested field. Exact phrase: will return articles where the words appear as a continuous phrase in the requested field.
• For author searches, use the format smith_cp. Author names are automatically expanded to include all combinations of initials, e.g. smith_c returns Smith C, Smith CA etc. You can turn this off by using exact phrase (instead of all words/any word)
• A question mark stands for any single character. An asterisk stands for any number of characters. These wildcards can be used at the end of a search term, and also at the beginning or in the middle of a word. The search may be slower in these cases. Examples: tumo* retrieves tumor, tumour, tumors, tumours, tumorigenisis, tumoricidal etc. nf* retrieves NF-κB, NFκB, NF-kB, NFkappaB, NF1 etc. j*son retrieves Johnson, Jonson, Janson, Jenson, Jackson, Johanson etc. j?nson retrieves Jonson, Janson, Jenson etc., but not Johnson.

Where is it: Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter B and select BioMed Central.

Quick Link: http://www.biomedcentral.com/