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Notes & Quotes

Electronic Resources and Services

by Gretchen Keer, Electronic Resources Librarian

It’s a new year and a new semester at Montgomery County Community College, and there are changes afoot in the Electronic Resources & Services at the library! In recent weeks there have been a few alterations to our electronic database offerings, and there are plans underway to update the library server.

You may have noticed that when you access CINAHL from the Electronic Resources page of the library homepage it looks a little different. That’s because we now subscribe to CINAHL through EBSCOhost. The CINAHL database itself is still the same, but there are a few important changes to take note of:

  • When you looked at the old CINAHL search page, you were presented three spaces where you could enter search terms. With the new CINAHL, as with any of the EBSCOhost databases, you can enter all of your search terms in the same search box. To get better results you can use AND and OR between your terms. If you click on “Search Tips” you can get more information on how to use AND and OR, also known as Boolean operators, in your searches.

  • The new CINAHL offers a different selection of limiters, such as “Journal Subset” and “Gender,” which are located below the search box. Limiting your search is how you make your results more specific. If you want to search articles on heart disease that were written between 2001 and 2003, enter “heart disease” in the search box and use the “Year of Publication” limiter to specify the date range. You can also tell the database to only search for full-text articles by clicking on the “Full Text” limiter.

If you’re interested in CINAHL and similar databases, don’t forget that Health Source: Nursing/Academic Elite is also available through EBSCO. CINAHL and Health Source both have full text articles on nursing, allied health, and other medical topics. Although the databases are similar in scope, it’s often the case that one database will have the full text to an article that the other database does not. CINAHL has the full text of 58 journals plus legal cases, clinical innovations, critical paths, drug records, research instruments, clinical trials and provides indexing and abstracting for over 1,700 current nursing and allied health journals and publications dating back to 1982. Health Source has 550 scholarly full text journals and abstracts and indexing for more than 800 journals.

Some of the information in CINAHL and Health Source overlaps, but not all of it. Luckily, you can search both databases at the same time through EBSCOhost. Click on the link to EBSCO on our Electronic Resources page. You will be prompted to pick databases from a list. To add both of the databases to your search, check the boxes next to both CINAHL and Health Source and click “Continue.” Any search terms you enter will then be checked against all of the databases you chose on the database selection page.

Another change in our electronic offerings is the fact that due to contract changes between database vendors we no longer have access to Humanities Index, Social Sciences Index, and Biographies Plus. However, EBSCO has just recently added two new databases: American Humanities Index and Communications & Mass Media Complete.

American Humanities Index provides citation information for articles, essays and reviews, as well as original creative works including, poems, fiction, photographs, paintings and illustrations. Communications & Mass Media Complete is the result of the combination of two other collections, CommSearch (formerly produced by the National Communication Association (NCA)), and Mass Media Articles Index (formerly produced by Pennsylvania State University). It offers full text for over 200 titles as well as citation information for additional materials.

As always, if you are interested about learning more about any of the databases we offer here at the library feel free to come in and ask a reference librarian!