SIRS: Social Issues Researcher

SIRS offers you thousands of full text articles selected from a wide range of magazines on topics that deal primarily with social science issues. A much smaller number can be found on science and humanities topics. It contains very few scholarly research articles, but has many of interest to social science professionals.

Searching
The SIRS home page offers you three ways to search and some nice additional features. The three basic ways are:

1. Keyword or word search--a broad method of searching. Some of what you find will be on target, some may have no relation to what you're looking for.

2. Subject search--the best way to search. Use the same subjects you'd use when you search LOIS, our catalog. Try more than one subject approach if you strike out the first time

3. Topic browse--preselected commonly researched topi Ics and articles. Exploring this site may help you generate a topic for your paper. Whichever way you search, a click on the underlined title of the article takes you to the full text.

In addition most articles offer you summaries and information on how to cite that article in your paper. Some offer you graphics (charts, graphs, maps) also. Click on the appropriate icon:

Bookshelf for the citation.
Page/document for the summary.
Camera for the graphic.

Other Features
SIRS also offers a Today's News feature, Maps, a Spotlight of the Month feature, general information on citations, searching tips, World Almanac Excerpts, etc. Just click and you're there. Most of these are self explanatory; the Spotlight of the Month is so good that it deserves a special mention. Spotlight of the Month highlights a very specific topic, usually something that has current relevance.

Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe
The main menu of Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe offers you a choice amont 18 different databases. They are all "full text" with the exception of Medical Abstracts which as its name suggests, contains only abstracts of summaries. Take some time to explore a few. If you time is limited (like your paper is due tomorrow) ask a member of the library staff for help.

Two of the most useful databases are General News Topics and Medical. If you're looking for articles on medical subjects try both of these. Journals which discuss health topics appear in the General News Topics database.

Whichever database you are using, explore the options/paramaters contained there. If you click and hold in the boxes labeled "source" and "date" you will see that there are more menu options. (Boxes which contain pull-down menus may have a little black triangle, or may be shadowed, or may simply be blank). Use your mouse to drag down to the option you want.

Example: under General News Topics, you can change the default form newspapers to magazines. The database search form provides you with boxes to type in your topic. To activate the box so that you can type in it, click anywhere in the box. To move to the next to, click again, or hit the tab key. Type in your topic.

Read the search tips to use whichever database you're in to the best effect. Also, these databases are extremely unforgiving on spelling., be sure your spelling is correct. Once you've practiced some, you can use some of the more advancedsearch techniques to get more accurate and specific results.

Be sure to explore the date parameters. Otherwise you may get too large a set of data to retrieve. If you know the date that an article was printed, enter the date in both the date boxes.

(Remember that if you're looking for newspaper articles and you know the date that an event happened, morning newspapers will carry the story a day later. Nowadays many, if not most, newspapers are morning papers.)

If you know the title of the article and the byline or author, type the title in the first box, and the byline in the second. Type the date--same date in both boxes. When your search form is filled in, with all the options/parameters as you want them, click in the search box on the Lexis screen. Once you have retrieved a set of search results, you can click on the highlighted and underlined source to go directly to the full text.

Print by clicking the print button on your browser, and press return. If you're in the library, your laser printout will be available at the front desk.

Print Tip:
To print only part of an article in SIRS or Lexis, open a word processing document and highlight the desired text (by clicking and dragging with your mouse) and use the cut and paste feature of your word processing package to transfer the text. Be sure to add the source and the complete citation. You can then print your newly created document. This saves paper and printer toner.