Communication Studies - Alexander: Getting Started

Access articles and electronic books from the Library's subscription databases from off-campus! When you click on a database, you will be prompted for your user name (your student ID) and PIN (the two-digit month and day of your birth in MMDD format).

Example for student with ID number 88-123-4567 born February 25th:

User name: 881234567
PIN: 0225

Search ProQuest for articles about your topic. It offers a wide breadth of information from a variety of sources, including magazines, newspapers, scholarly journals and more.

Search LexisNexis below for landmark court case decisions, newspaper articles, articles from law reviews and more.

Below are some suggested databases for your research as well as some search tips.

• Use AND to narrow your results by searching for two keywords simultaneously.
  Example: immigration AND border control
• Use OR to broaden your results by searching for either two or more keywords
  Enclose terms separated by OR in parentheses
  Example: (dog OR canine)
• Use quotation marks ("") to search for terms as a phrase
  Example: "genetically modified food"
• Use asterisks to retrieve additional forms of a word
  Example: parent* retrieves parent, parents, parenting, parenthood, etc.
• Limit your results to academic or scholarly sources if you need academic sources.

Putting it all together

Use all the above search tip sto refine your search.
Example: juvenile* AND ("death penalty" OR "capital punishment")

Click the link below for a video tutorial and search tips for using ProQuest