Have you ever wished you could search all the databases at once?
Well, you can!
If you've visited Ignacio's webpage lately, you might have noticed something called
Research Pro. This is where you can search multiple databases at once.
[click to enlarge]
I did a search in all the databases for: film AND gender
[click to enlarge]
What do the results mean?
The first database to report back was America History and Life, so that's the results I view immediately.
As you can see, I got results from all the databases -- some more than others: 1627 hits in ATLA Religion, and 436 in OneFile.
Research Pro is most valuable in giving you an overview of the best places to search -- i.e. the places you will get the most results in the discipline you desire. If you find a particular database is providing rich information, you may want to exit Research Pro and enter that database to search it directly.
[click to enlarge]
WARNING: Sometimes your results will be skewed because of an overlap of terms. For example, the word "film" will bring up hits in various databases about movies; in scientific databases it will bring up hits about the film scientists use to view tiny organisms with microscopes.
Research Pro also has an advanced option search, which you can use to further define your search.
[click to enlarge]
Besides doing a keyword search, you can also search by title, author and subject. This is handy if a patron wants to find all the articles written by a certain person or if s/he can't remember where they found an article but has the title.
PLEASE NOTE:
1. Research Pro does not work in Safari (I know, totally lame)
2. If you select no group of databases to search from the advanced search screen, Research Pro defaults to a yucky group we're trying to eliminate -- this yucky group displays Google Image results first because Google is the fastest responding database. We don't want that there, so hopefully it will be removed soon.
 |
Check it out and tell me how you can use this tool in your own research or helping patrons. Do you think it's cool? Or another pain in the butt? |