 Academic Search Complete is a gigantic multidisciplinary database filled with many sources, including full-text journal articles covering just about every academic subject from 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Academic Search Complete was created specifically for academic institutions and is a great tool for students in need of scholarly articles for their research assignments. Even if you are not sure which topic you will choose to research or which academic discipline your topic falls under, Academic Search Complete is a great place to start your research because it contains sources on virtually everything. If you are unsure about how to get to and log into the IRSC Libraries databases, see the link to the login video in the description below. When you first arrive at the Academic Search Complete database, you will see the Advanced Search page. This page consists of search fields where you enter your keywords and select your search options called Limiters. Let's start with the search fields. Choosing concise and descriptive keywords that get right to the point is the right way to use keyword searching in Academic Search Complete. If I am interested in articles about the future impact of climate change on the state of Florida, I can type Climate Change into the first search field and Florida into the second search field. You can see the default is to combine the keywords in the search fields with the Boolean operator AND. Leaving it set to the default AND will usually serve you well because this means that the words in both search fields must be present somewhere in the article or its record in order for the article to be returned in the search results list. You can use OR for situations where either the first keyword or the second or both would be acceptable. An example of a search where OR could be useful is if I wasn't sure if climate change or global warming was the preferred terminology. I could search for both combined with OR and receive all articles that mention either or both of those terms. Use the third Boolean operator NOT sparingly as the database will eliminate all articles containing the keyword entered after NOT from the search even if the article is not primarily about that keyword. Now before we click search let's have a look at the limiters. You can set some or all limiters now or after searching on the results screen where the limiters will appear on the left side of the screen. Commonly used limiters include full text, scholarly peer-reviewed journals, and published date. By selecting full text you are eliminating from your results articles which IRSE libraries does not have full access to. While many of the sources in this database are scholarly or peer-reviewed some sources like videos or newspaper and magazine articles are not. If your assignment requires scholarly articles go ahead and check this box to weed out sources which have not been peer-reviewed. Similarly some professors require students to use newer sources. If your assignment specifies sources published in the last five years you can set that now in the published date fields. Now we're ready to click search. After searching you will see the results page. Your search fields are still at the top of the screen and the limiters are now to the left. Your search results are this list of articles shown in the center of the screen. They are listed by date newest by default but you can change that to sort by relevance instead if you like. The journal article titles are listed first and are hyperlinked. You can click on any title to see the detailed record and the full text of the article. Let's have a look at one article by clicking on the title. This is the detailed record for one journal article. You can see the title, the authors, the source, which is the journal the article is from, the subject terms, which are the categories the database uses to group similar articles together, and the abstract which provides a summary of the article. The full text of the article will be available at the bottom in HTML or over in the top left as a PDF or sometimes both. On the right side we have some tools. Email, site, and permalink are very handy tools. When you find an article you like and may want to use, it's a good idea to email it to yourself right away so that you don't have to try to recreate your search if you decide later on that you want to use it. Click on the email tool then enter your email address into the email to field. You can select the radio button next to citation format and choose your citation style from the list to email yourself a direct link to this article and the references or works cited citation. The site tool is everyone's favorite feature. Click on site then scroll down in the window that appears above the article title. Find the citation style used in your class and copy the citation. Now you have a complete citation you can carefully paste into your references or works cited page. This tool does make some mistakes so check your citation against the examples on the citation lib guides to be sure it's correct. The permalink tool is useful for sharing the exact location of this article with others at IRSE like your instructor. Congratulations! Now you're ready to search for articles using the database Academic Search Complete.