Thursday, March 06, 2014

Hey, where's the article?


Sometimes we get asked this question, "Hey, where is the article?" when people have been using one of our article databases, like Academic Search Complete. First off, not everything in them is full text; a lot is, but not all. If you see this button then the article just isn't immediately present, click on it to find out more:

You can also limit to just full text in our different databases, usually a check box on the left side. The only thing then is to remember that even peer reviewed journal articles, full text, while usually 5, 10 or more pages, can be short too. For example, this article, Intercollegiate Athletics' Opportunity to Pay for Universal Intramural Sports from the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, 2008, via Academic Search, is only 2/3 of a page long. Yes, that's right, just 2/3, as in less than one page. You can see for yourself when skimming through a list of records how long each is. Under the title of the article is a line with the author name and so on, and at the end is a number followed by "p" for page, e.g. "2/3p." Once in awhile this comes up, where someone is expecting to see something longer, and thinks maybe they didn't actually get the whole article. They did, it's just a case of what you see is what you get :-)

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