Research Guides: COMM 307: Quantitative Methods in Communication: Library Databases

Communication & Mass Media Complete

Getting Started: Communication & Mass Media Complete

Communication & Mass Media Complete
Library databases are especially good for complex keyword searches, so start your literature review here. Search your keywords in this database and locate a few articles that address each component of your research topic. C&MMC provides full text or citations for over 60 journals in communication, media, and other related fields.

Database Search Tips

Search Tips

Enter a few of your keywords in each of the search boxes, one set of related terms per row.
Click the + button if you need to add a row.
Add OR in capital letters between each search term.

Scroll through the first 1-2 pages of search results. Read article titles and hover over the magnifying glass icon to view abstracts. Look for quantitative studies that address each component of your topic.

Check the Peer Reviewed Articles box on the left side.
Experiment with different keywords and filters to see how that changes your results.
Look at the Subjects listed under each article result. Do they give you any new keyword ideas?
To save the link to a search: Click Share at the top right of your search results, and copy and paste the permalink.
To save the link to an article: Click Permalink on the right side of the article landing page, and copy the link.

Adjust Your Results

How To Tweak Your Results

If you're getting very few results (not enough), try these strategies:

Widen your research topic. Is there a way to make it more general or to remove references to a specific population of people, brand, location, etc.?
Delete out a row of keywords.
Add some keywords to each row, making sure to add OR in between.

If you're getting thousands of results (too many), try these strategies:

In your keywords, add quotation marks around phrases of two or more words, so the database searches the words in that exact order. For example: "young people" "social media"
Narrow your research topic. Focus on a more specific population of people, country, brand or platform, etc.
Use the filters on the left to narrow down your results. Try checking the Peer Reviewed Articles box, or changing the publication date so it's just the past 5-10 years.
Delete a few keywords from each row.

Try Other Databases

Are you still not finding much? Does your topic pertain to a specific area of communications, like healthcare, politics, marketing, or education? Try searching your keywords in another database. Here are a few that might work well:

Academic Search Ultimate
Multi-disciplinary database providing information for nearly every area of academic study. Includes an enormous collection of the most valuable peer-reviewed full text journals, as well as additional journals, magazines, newspapers and books. Multidisciplinary subjects including: social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, physics, chemistry, language & linguistics, arts & literature, medicine, ethnic studies. 1965- present.
Business Source Complete
Business Source Complete contains articles from thousands of newspapers, trade publications, such as the Harvard Business Review and other major key business magazines in all disciplines of business, including economics. Additional full text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and more.
Education Source
Around 1,800 journals (full-text) and over 550 books and monographs in the field of Education. Access to conference papers and indexing and abstracts from thousands of journals. Book reviews and article citations (roughly 5 million).
PsycINFO
PsycINFO is the most comprehensive index in psychology and related fields, with more than 1.7 million citations and abstracts of journal articles, book chapters and books, technical reports, and dissertations. Its holdings include material from 1,700 periodicals in over 30 languages. Covering the entire range of psychology disciplines, PsycINFO also includes information about the psychological aspects of related fields such as psychiatry, neuroscience, medicine, sociology, education, linguistics, anthropology, business and law. PsycINFO spans 1887 to the present. PsycINFO has links to the full-text articles in PsycARTICLES and the Psychology and in the Behavioral Sciences Collection (thus the user does not have to search each of these databases separately).
Public Health
This database delivers core public health literature with centralized access to journals, dissertations, videos, news, trade publications, reports, and more. Journal results are indexed from core literature collected from a variety of publishers using appropriate public-health terminology. Covers a wide variety of disciplines ranging from social sciences and biological sciences to business.
SocIndex with Full Text
The index features more than 1,300,000 records with subject headings from a 15,600 term sociology-specific thesaurus designed by expert lexicographers. This product also contains informative abstracts for more than 620 "core" coverage journals dating back to 1895. In addition, this file provides data mined from more than 500 "priority" coverage journals as well as over 1,390 "selective" coverage journals. Further, extensive indexing for books, monographs, conference papers, and other sources is included. Contains full text for 242 "core" coverage journals dating back to 1895, and 72 "priority" coverage journals. This database also includes full text for 547 books and monographs, and full text for 6,711 conference papers.
PAIS Index
From 1915 - Covers the world's public affairs, public and social policies, international relations, and world politics. Includes the policy oriented literature such as economics, finance, law, education, the military, political science, public administration, international law and relations, the environment, demography, public health and science and technology.

Database Finder
Even more databases! Explore the UMD Libraries' full collection of research databases