The library offers access to many sources that are not available for free on the internet. The following instructions demonstrate how to find and use these sources.
Searching FOR a Specific Publication
Looking for a specific publication? Check out these step-by-step instructions for two examples.
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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (newspaper)
- Go to the UW-Madison Libraries’ homepage
- Select “Journals” from the drop-down menu above the search box
- Type the name of the newspaper you are searching for in the search box, e.g. “Milwaukee Journal Sentinel”
- Change the drop-down from “Keywords” to “Title” and check “Available Online”
- Select the “Submit” button
- Locate the newspaper in the results and select the title to open a page with more information; you may see several editions or versions of the same newspaper, so pay attention to dates and descriptions such as “evening edition”
- Select “View Online” to see online access options as well as the time span covered for each option (each option listed is a different database that provides access to that publication, e.g. Factiva, Newsbank Access World News, and US Newsstream)
- Select one of the linked database names (e.g. Newsbank Access World News)
- Click on your chosen database to search within the newspaper for a specific topic or to browse by date.
Nation's Restaurant News (trade publication)
- Go to the UW-Madison Libraries’ homepage
- Select “Journals” from the drop-down menu above the search box
- Type the name of the journal you are searching for in the search box, e.g. “Nation’s Restaurant News”
- Change drop-down from “Keywords” to “Title” and check “Available Online”
- Select the “Submit” button
- Locate the publication in the results and select the title to open a page with more information
- Select “View Online” to see online access options as well as the time span covered for each option (each option listed is a different database that provides access to that publication, e.g. Nexis Uni)
- Click on your chosen database to search within the publication for a specific topic or to browse by date.
Searching WITHIN a Specific Publication
Once you have found a specific publication in a database, you can perform searches within that publication, to see what that publication says about a topic. For example, you might want to survey what Fortune has published about the restaurant industry or what Journal of Marketing Research has published about TikTok in the past couple of years.
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Fortune (popular magazine)
- Select the database you have chosen to use
- Look for a link, or even a search box on the publication page for your journal within the database, to search ONLY within that journal
- Search for a term or subject to see if this publication covers the topic
- Note that you can sort your results from most recent to least recent, to get a sense of coverage over time or simply to focus on their most recent coverage
Journal of Marketing Research (scholarly journal)
- Select the database you have chosen to use
- Look on the Publication Page for your journal within the database for a link, or even a search box on that page, to search ONLY within that journal
- Search for a term or subject to see if this publication covers the topic
- Note that you can sort your results from most recent to least recent, to get a sense of coverage over time or simply to focus on their most recent coverage
Scanning Tables of Contents
Looking through the tables of contents of multiple issues is a good way to understand what kinds of topics a publication covers. If you’re looking at a trade publication, it’s also a good way to learn about topics under discussion in that industry.
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Minority Business Entrepreneur (trade publication)
- Perform a journal search for your publication and find the Publication Page for your journal within the database
- Look on the Publication Page for a list of available Issues by date.
- Choose the issue you are interested in by clicking on it.
- Scan the list of articles for that issue (the table of contents) to get an idea of the content contained in that journal
HR Magazine (trade publication)
- Perform a journal search for your publication and find the Publication Page for your journal within the database
- Look on the Publication Page for a list of available Issues by date
- Choose the issue you are interested in by clicking on it.
- Scan the list of articles for that issue (the table of contents) to get an idea of the content contained in that journal
Searching Within Databases
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Refining Search Results
Special symbols can help you to refine your searches. These strategies work in library databases, but also in search engines like Google, Duck Duck Go, and Bing.
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Boolean Operator Examples
| Operators | Examples |
|---|---|
| ” “ Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase |
“tax accountant” “actuarial consultant” |
| * Use an asterisk sign to replace anything that comes after the letter immediately before it; this is called truncation |
econom* This will find articles that contain any of the following words: economy, economies, economical, economist, econometrics, etc. |
| AND Use AND to limit results to articles that contain two terms |
software AND engineer “customer service” AND hospitality |
| OR Use OR to broaden your search |
health actuary OR retirement actuary |
| ( ) Use parentheses to do a complex search |
Manager AND (Employee relations OR human resources) This strategy will find both human resources managers and employee relations managers. |
| – Use the hyphen to exclude a term from the search |
Marketing -Sales This limits results to only those with Marketing and excludes those with the term Sales.) |
| -site: Use this strategy to exclude a website from the search results |
Human resources -site:wikipedia.org This limits results to sources other than Wikipedia. |
| ~ Use the tilde to find your search term and its synonyms |
~procurement This strategy searches for the term procurement and its synonyms. |
| Related: Put related: in front of a web address you already know to find articles from similar websites |
Related:nytimes.com This searches websites similar to the one in the search. |
How to Use Boolean Operators to Search Publications
Try using a combination of the search strategies in the table above when searching within a database. For example, looking at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (scholarly journal), one might use the following search terms:
- “climate change”
- water OR drought OR rainfall
- America*
