 This video will explain why Academic One File is a useful database for student researchers and show you some tips on how to search it effectively. Academic One File is an academic article database. That means it's a huge collection of articles that were published in many different popular magazines, scholarly journals, and major newspapers that you can search. It's available to Kirkwood students, faculty, and staff through the library's subscription. The publications cover a wide variety of topics including social sciences, medicine, science and technology, arts, and literature. So you can search this database for information sources on just about any topic you're researching for class or for personal interest. The biggest reason to use One File for research is because the articles tend to be much more reliable than information found through a Google search. The purpose of these articles tend to be information or scholarly rather than for entertainment or to gain followers. The authors typically have a more academic or educational focus and have spent a long time studying their topic versus the free online content found through Google that is often written by freelance writers trying to get more clicks who have less interest in accuracy and scholarship. Google is a powerful search engine and it definitely has its uses, but for your academic research library databases are going to serve you much better. Academic One File is a subscription database that Kirkwood pays for, so you need to get to it through the library website rather than just searching for one file using Google. From the library home page, click on Journal articles under the find heading. From this list of all the library subscription databases, select Academic One File. This database opens to a basic search screen, but it's more than just a basic search. Let's look around a little on this page. We see the search box, of course. We also see these three search tools underneath. The topic finder, subject guide search and publication search. These two on the right, the subject guide and publication search are pretty self explanatory and can be very useful. I encourage you to try out the topic finder. It uses keyword searching to create a visual results screen. Let's try it out on my search term, bioluminescence. How the topic finder displays the results. Rather than a list of hundreds of articles spread across many pages, I have a single screen that conveys a lot of helpful information about my results. This image shows which terms appear in the top results from my keyword search. And these are nested. If I click on one term, then I can browse articles. These are articles about bioluminescence and proteins. The results are nested as well with some of these. I can go even deeper if I want. If I click on stem cells, it's going to be articles about stem cells and proteins and bioluminescence. I really like this as a way to explore your topic or to browse articles. And I hope you'll give it a try. Let's go back now to the basic search because that's the one you'll likely end up using the most. It's useful because it has a simple and familiar one search box type interface, but also has results screen with tools to guide you into the realm of advanced searching. I'll try my bioluminescence search here again and include the second keyword proteins that I discovered in the topic finder. One file will look for articles where both of these terms appear prominently. On the results screen, we're tempted to just start quickly scrolling through the results. I'm suggesting that instead you take a little different tactic here that you might with, say, a Google search results page. Taking just 30 seconds to pause and look around is going to help you get better results more efficiently. So I'm looking for a few things. First, I'm going to read the first two or three titles to see if I'm close to getting the results I want. If they're obviously way off, I'm going to revisit my keyword search and see what I could do differently. Of course, it's possible you'll see the perfect article right there at the top and you're good to go. But often, you need to do a little more work to get there. Second, I want to see how many and what type of results I got. Too many and I know I need to narrow down my search even more. Too few and maybe I got too specific in my search or maybe I misspelled a term or I'm using a term that's not very common. One file has this feature I really like where it shows you results in groupings according to the type of publication the articles came from. They're listed right across the top. Academic journals, magazines and news in this case, also sometimes books and videos. So it's giving me ready-made options for making sense of my results. I know now that I'm looking at all academic journal articles here. Maybe I'd rather have something shorter and easier to access and so I might switch over to look at the magazines group. Third, I'm going to review my filters to see if there's one I want to use. I can see here that some of these articles are older. It's a scientific topic. I probably want them to be pretty current. So I'm going to go to the publication date filter, which lets me go back. Let's say I want to go back five years and up to the most current. I apply that and now my results go down to half as many, 257, but I know that those are all current. You can see there's some other filters here and that's certainly something you can play around with to really get at the results that you need to see for your research. There are some great features within the reading screen. For example, I can have it read any article to me using the listen button. I can have it translate into many different languages. I can have it generate a citation in MLA or APA format. I can get a unique link to the article so I can share it with someone or save it for myself. As you can see there are many other features and tools here on this article view. To review, we used topic finder to help us narrow down a broad keyword and explore our search results in a different way. We use the basic search to play around with different keywords for our topic. We explored search filters to give us better control over the results we want to see. And remember to try out the article features to support all your various research tasks. That was just a quick introduction to accessing the high quality resources available in the Academic One File Database. For more resources to help you with academic research, see the Kirkwood Library website.