Page 218 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

Chapter 7 Researching Your Message 185

Search Relevant Indexes, Abstracts, and Databases
An index is an alphabetical listing of sources by topic of information—usually index
in newspapers, journals, and magazines that are not freely available via the A listing of sources of
open Internet. An abstract is a summary of an article or a report. Every topic information—usually in
you can imagine is classifi ed in one or more specialized indexes. A good library newspapers, journals,
has hundreds or even thousands of indexes related to specialized fi elds. Some and magazines—alpha-
indexes list and abstract articles in journals. Today, more and more indexes are betically by topic.
available in the form of online databases. For example, a partial list of databases
available through our university library is provided in Exhibit 7.2. abstract
Whether your topic is art, science, religion, philosophy, or health and medi- A summary of an article
or a report.
cine, computerized databases can assist you in fi nding reliable information. Your
library will undoubtedly differ from ours in the available indexes. However, the
basic search principles will be the same regardless of the index used.
Let’s look at a sample search using a popular database. Academic Search is
an excellent source for searching scholarly and professional journals in the so-
cial sciences, humanities, and physical sciences. This database contains infor-
mation on everything from astronomy to religion, law, psychology, and current
events. Not only are citations and abstracts of articles available, but Academic
Search also allows us to access the full texts of many articles. To search, we
simply follow easy on-screen directions to enter appropriate search terms. The
same Boolean operators we would use in an online catalog search can be used
with most computerized databases. When we enter our search, a list of citations
will be produced, and we mark the ones that interest us for viewing. Depending
on the library’s facilities, we may be able to print, copy to a disk, or even e-mail
the results of our search.
To illustrate the power of Academic Search, in May 2007 we did a search
for articles on global warming. We typed the words “global warming” into the
search box and got 11,414 hits, far too many to be useful. By adding the Boolean
operator “and” along with the words “greenhouse gas” we were able to reduce

Exhibit 7.2
Database Description of Coverage
Examples of Databases
at CSU, Chico, with De-
Academic Search More than 4,650 periodicals covering the social
sciences, humanities, general science, multicultural scription of Coverage
studies, education, etc.
Biological Abstracts Nearly 6,000 journals covered, representing agriculture,
(BIOSIS) biochemistry, biotechnology, ecology, immunology,
microbiology, etc.
Communication & Scholarly and trade publications in communications,
Mass Media communication disorders, and journalism/mass media;
Complete abstracts for several hundred titles, with full text
available for more than 200 titles.
CQ Researcher Full-text issues written in accessible language, including
pros/cons, background info, the current situation, and
references to other information sources on current
affairs controversies.
LexisNexis Academic Full text news and legal information; includes newspa-
pers, magazines, court opinions, laws, and law review
articles.