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