how to use
How to Use ABI/Inform Complete and Wall Street Journal
*Up-to-date articles from the newspaper and the eminent periodical literature database*
The Library offers both the Wall Street Journal and ABI/INFORM Complete , the business periodical database which incorporates Global, Dateline and Trade and Industry. To access them from the Library's Homepage, select the Databases tab, and choose the link for ABI/INFORM Complete from the alphabetical list. Both of these databases are published by ProQuest, and therefore have almost identical user interfaces. The following user guide can be used for either database.
Basic Searching and Date Ranges:
To search: Enter keywords into the search bar. On the date range pull down menu, choose a pre-set date range or write in your own. (See picture below). You may also choose to limit to "full text" or to "scholarly journals." To search for a specific phrase, use quotation marks. To truncate a word, use a '*'.
Advanced Searching:
To combine keyword searching on various fields, click on the Advanced Search tab. The Advanced Search screen can be used to search by author, subject, words in title, company name, product name, or publication title, or all fields. (Note: personal name is different from author in that the computer will search for articles about the person, not by the person, when personal name is used.) You may limit by date or date range, within whichever file you have chosen.
Example of a Combined Search: If you know a particular company has implemented an organizational change that you are interested in and you want any articles about it, you can search for organizational change in all fields and combine it with the name of the company in the company field. ABI/INFORM Complete will insert an automatic 'AND' between search terms. Remember: For synonyms, you will want to use an 'OR' between terms. To combine different concepts, AND should be used.
Article Record: When you find an article that you want to view, just click on the title. The article record includes the author's name(s), subject terms and all corporate or personal names under which the article has been catalogued. All of these terms act as "hot links". In other words you may see other articles written by the same author simply by clicking on the author's name. The same goes for subject terms, corporate names, and personal names (if there are any).
When the article is an abstract: You may click on "Check availability of this periodical in Saint Mary's College Library Periodical List." This tells you if we have the periodical on site in our periodical collection and if the periodical is full text in another database. If it is in another database you may re-execute the search. If not you may still get he article via the "request article" form on the Library home page.
Finding similar articles: The quickest way to find similar articles is to click on "Show Options for Finding Similar Articles." You will then be able to select and combine subject terms, etc. from the original article and execute a search for those articles containing the selected terms.
Finding a known article: When you already know the title and author of an article, you can search for the article in ABI/INFORM by using keywords in the title field and the author's name in the author field. A good search strategy to use after finding one article that you like on a particular topic is to search for others on that topic written by the same author. Use keywords or subject terms and the author's name.
Searching by publication:
You can browse by publication by clicking on the "Publication" tab. Type in the exact name of your publication. You can then browse by date. This can be used in the Wall Street Journal to browse articles -- stocks not included -- of any edition of the paper, including the current day's
Browsing lists:
Under Browse Lists, you can browse the list of subject, personal names and companies names. Then click on any to find all articles indexed under these terms or use them to construct a Guided Search.
Subject Searching:
The Topic Guide contains a lit of subject terms and can help you direct the scope of your search. For example, a subject used as keyword will bring up articles that have that word in the article title, abstract or full-text, depending on which field you pick. This does not insure that you will get all articles on the topic. If you check the Topic Guide and find either your term or a similar term, you may use that term as a subject word. Now you have a better chance of getting articles on that subject. Below is part of the Topic Guide, (often called a thesaurus in other databases). Search the subject list by keyword and see also terms near the word searched.
This shows us that "organizational change" is a subject term. Therefore one could do a search for "Microsoft" as a company and "organizational change" as a subject term. Our resulting list of articles will be more on-topic.
Topic Finder: Another way to find subject terms, in addition to using the subject browse list in which terms are listed alphabetically is to go under Topic Finder. You will find a general subject index, in which terms are indexed conceptually, not alphabetically, as they are under Browse List. This is helpful if you have only a fuzzy idea of what term you want to use.
Saving Searches and Search Help:
Also on the header you will find Marked List. This tracks recent searches and is helpful if you want to combine a new search with one of your saved searches. Throughout ABI/INFORM's search screens, there are links to subject specific help guides which provide you with tips on searching. For example if you want to truncate a word in ABI/INFORM Complete, you must use a '*'. So if you search for organiz*, you will retrieve organize, organization, organizational, etc...
Displaying/Printing/E-mailing
After you do your search you will see a list of articles. Full text articles can be displayed by clicking on "text and graphics" or on (in some cases) PDF. If the article says "find a copy," click on the record to check Saint Mary's College Periodical List to see if it is available in the Library or in another database.
To print or e-mail an article, simply click on the appropriate box that is displayed with the article. You may also mark items on a list and then send yourself that list by first checking the articles that you want, then going to the results pull-down menu, and clicking on "Marked Lists" and "Durable Links."
If you have any questions please call reference at (925) 631- 4624 or Sharon Radcliff, the Business Librarian at (925) 631-4413.
