Library Guides: COM116 Library Research Skills Guide: Use Journal Databases

WHAT IS A DATABASE?

Journal databases are collections of journals, articles, conference papers, reports, and more, generally arranged by subject. The strength of journal databases is that they have many options for expanding or refining your search results, and they will link between themselves, so that an abstract found on one database can help you find the full text if it is held elsewhere.

CSU subscribes to many Databases on your behalf. These databases have been categorised by subject area to help you find what you're looking for more effectively. There are also some journal databases that Primo Search cannot search.

Why Should You Use Journal Databases?

Journal databases:

Are the best source of academic or scholarly information for your assessments
help you locate peer reviewed articles
Are subject specific, so that you get more relevant results
Have many options for refining results

You can find the Library's databases on the A-Z Databases page.

Databases are grouped into subject areas. The Communication & Creative Industries list will be particularly useful for your study.

TRY IT NOW

Go to the Communication & Mass Media Complete database, and try typing in "Public relations" (you may need to sign in first with your CSU username and password).

Did you get less results than Primo Search? Being a Communications database, they should be more relevant to your topic.
Look at the HTML and PDF links to access the full text of the article.
If you cannot find the full text click on the button to check if the article is available elsewhere.

Searching in a database

Key Communication Journal Databases

Communication and Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window
An EBSCOhost database on communication and mass media, with indexing and abstracting for more than 770 journals, and including the full-text of more than 450 journals and numerous books.
Communication & Mass Media Complete incorporates the content of CommSearch (formerly produced by the National Communication Association) and Mass Media Articles Index (formerly produced by Pennsylvania State University) along with numerous other journals in communication and mass media. It contains a sophisticated Communication Thesaurus

Subjects covered include communication; cultural studies; education; international relations; language and linguistics; mass media; media; politics; and public relations.

Coverage varies with title but extends back to 1915.

Communication & Mass Media Complete is one of many databases available in EBSCOhost. Once on the EBSCOhost search screen, you can change databases by clicking on the Choose Databases link above the search boxes. All EBSCOhost databases can be searched individually or in any combination.
SAGE Video - Media, Communication, & Cultural Studies Collection This link opens in a new window
A collection of hundreds of online streaming videos, covering communication and media and cultural studies.
Specific topics include:
* Advertising
* Communication studies
* Film production
* Journalism
* Media studies
* New media
* Popular culture and cultural studies
* Research methods for media, communication and cultural studies.

You can search the entire collection using Basic or Advanced Search, or browse by Topic, Video Type, or Contributor. Closed captions and transcripts are available.

You can create clips, retrieve and export citations, and build playlists.

For help with using the SAGE Video collections, go to the SAGE Video guide. You can see all the video titles at the title list.
Emerald Insight This link opens in a new window
A database of journals covering international management research, and eBooks covering business, management, economics, and social sciences.
All content is published by Emerald Publishing.

Specific business and management topics include: accounting; human resource management; industrial and organisational psychology leadership; library and information science; and marketing.There is also coverage of engineering, applied science, and technology.

The social sciences eBooks cover a range of sociology, education, politics, and psychology topics.

If you go to the Browse tab, you can browse the books and journals, with filters for journal or book title, subject, and publication type.

If you go to Advanced Search, you can filter your search by type of content, date, and, importantly, access type. The access type filter has options for:
• All content
• Only open access
• Only content I have access to.

Charles Sturt has full-text access to all of the journal content and some of the eBook content. Case studies are not included in our subscription. Items available in full-text are marked with a green tick.