One customer asked me a few specific questions that led to a number of different resources and search strategies. The questions were: "I want to find the article regarding 'Sudden Infant Death Syndrome' in the Washington Post, and I also need to have consumer reports in March 2013 about a laptop, and I want to find peer reviewed articles regarding tobacco's health aspects."

For the first question, I went to the Washington Post Health & Science website and searched 'Sudden Infant Death Syndrome' as a keyword in the search box. I got too many results and most of them were the blog type articles. 

So, I searched by the same keyword in Newspaper Source Plus database, and I selected 'Article' in the Document Type and also typed 'The Washington Post' in the 'Publication' field at the database in order to limit the search results, then, I was able to find the right article in the Washington Post.

For the second question, I went to the Consumer Reports database, chose Vol. 78 Issue 3 - Mar2013 and clicked the advanced search function and then added 'laptop'  as a keyword in the search box, and I was able to find the article which the customer was looking for. 

For the last queston, I typed in 'Tobacco Health Aspects' in the Academic Search Complete database, and I selected 'Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals' to limit the results and came up with a list of scholarly articles about tobacco's health aspects.

Note that you do need a San Jose Library Card and PIN needed to access these databases. I think the customer left happy with the kind of targeted searching we can help you with!

See more Questions of the week!

San Jose Public Library is an exceptional city library system for many reasons – our outreach to San Jose's diverse, multicultural community and the award of last year's National Medal for Library Service certainly attest to this! Perhaps one of our most unique features is the fact that we are partnered with San Jose State University and a happy advantage of this academic partnership is, as a public library user, you are able to use SJSU’s wealth of information and even their databases –  if you physically go to Dr. King Library. 

However, if you would like to do scholarly research from home, there is no better tool than SJPL’s Academic Search Complete which you can search from home with your library card no. and PIN.  Having both peer-reviewed journals and popular magazines like Consumer Reports, Academic Search Complete is one of the world’s most comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text databases.  

So, if you are an SJPL user have an in-depth research project, don’t forget to look into Academic Search Complete as an excellent first stop.   

Have you ever thrown away a magazine and later realized you wanted to re-read an article from it? Well, good news! We have an online resource called Academic Search Complete that you can search for publications by title and date or article keywords. For example, maybe you wanted to read an article that was in the June issue of Fortune magazine. You could search by the magazine name and then you will be able to select which year and month you would like to view. This is a good way to browse the month's articles and especially helpful when you can't remember the article title. Other publications in Academic Search Complete that may be of interest: Money, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Economist, Inc., and Consumer Reports.