Subject Guides: CMST 210 Group Communication: Research Databases & Journals

Online Journals

Research Databases

Use the research databases below to locate journal articles relevant to this course. You can access these databases from both on and off-campus! If you are off-campus, you will be asked to authenticate by typing in your 14 digit HCC Library barcode number. This number is located on the back of your HCC ID card.

Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window Provides full text for 4000 academic social sciences, humanities, general science, education and multi-cultural journals.
Business Source Premier This link opens in a new window Provides full text for nearly 3300 scholarly business journals covering management, economics, finance, accounting, international business and much more.
CQ Researcher Online This link opens in a new window The Congressional Quarterly explores a single "hot" issue in the news in depth each week. Topics range from social and teen issues to environment, health, education and science and technology. Offers online access dating back to October 25, 1991.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window Full-text access to the archives of over 390 academic journals in the arts and sciences.
Nexis UNI This link opens in a new window Comprehensive database for news, business, legal, medical, and general reference sources. You can also validate your legal research more quickly and completely with their Shepard's Citations Service. Shepard’s helps you easily confirm that your case law citations are still good law.
Opposing Viewpoints in Context This link opens in a new window A premier online resource covering today's hottest social issues! Opposing Viewpoints in Context helps students research, analyze and organize a broad variety of data for conducting research, completing writing assignments, preparing for debates, creating presentations and more (Formerly Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center).
ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window Comprehensive database covering over 160 subjects. It includes the full-text of over 400 newspapers, nearly 30,000 dissertations and millions of articles from scholarly journals.
Psychology Database This link opens in a new window Provides abstracts and indexing for more than 460 titles, with over 380 titles available in full text. Users get access to charts, diagrams, graphs, tables, photos, and other graphical elements essential to psychological research.
Social Science Database This link opens in a new window Search full-text periodicals covering the social sciences.
SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window Includes full-text for 400 core journals in the field of sociology, as well as the full-text of more than 700 books.

Advanced Database Searching Using Boolean Operators

Boolean operators form the basis of database logic.

They connect your search words together to either narrow or broaden your set of results.
The three basic boolean operators are: AND, OR, and NOT.

Use AND in a search to:

narrow your results
tell the database that ALL search terms must be present in the resulting records

example: cloning AND humans AND ethics
The purple triangle in the middle of the Venn diagram below represents the result set for this search. It is a small set using AND, the combination of all three search words.

Use OR in a search to:

connect two or more similar concepts (synonyms)
broaden your results, telling the database that ANY of your search terms can be present in the resulting records

example: cloning OR genetics OR reproduction
All three circles represent the result set for this search. It is a big set because any of those words are valid using the OR operator.

Use NOT in a search to:

exclude words from your search
narrow your search, telling the database to ignore concepts that may be implied by your search terms

example: cloning NOT sheep