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CMNS 125, Professional Communications (Dr. Mai Anh Doan): Finding Scholarly and News Articles

This guide is designed to help you with your Communications 125 annotated bibliography assignment regarding public opinion on COVID-19 vaccines. It will help you find both scholarly journal articles and media reports about vaccine acceptance and hesitancy

Search UFV's databases and library catalogue all at once

Discover articles, books, videos, images, statistics, and more from the Library's print and online collections

Limit Your Results (optional)
~ OR ~

[Note: We are working to improve access to our collections and revising our subject headings to be more respectful and inclusive. Please be aware that you may see certain words or descriptions in search results or library materials which reflect the author’s attitude or that of the period in which the item was created and may now be considered offensive.]

Using the Find It Search Box

When you have done your search, don’t forget to use the limiters. The main ones are:

Available in Library Collection.............. you will be able to read the articles/books online or find them in the library
Scholarly Peer Reviewed Journals ..... if you need journal articles only
Print Books........................................ limits mainly to our physical book, collection
Subject ................................................... a listing of alternative keywords that you can use to improve your search
Geography............................................... want to limit to Canada? use this
Limit by Database  ................................ gives you a list of the databases that have been searched (from here you can limit to only one database)

 

There are a small number of databases which are not pre-indexed in the EBSCO's central index, including  Canadian Business and Current Affairs, Canadian Newsstand, and  CPI-Q.

The database names are displayed on the right side of the screen.  You may click on the database to view the additional search results.

Remember to use this toolbar to easily:

Email yourself the article

Cite your article (provides the citation in many different styles)

Permalink links to the article whether you are on or off campus. Use this link to email to your professor, or classmates.

 

  1. By default, Find It searches all terms you have entered, without the need to use AND.  For example: children television violence will find items that contain all 3 terms.
     
  2. By default, Find It searches through the full text of documents (if available).  This may cause a large number of results, and not all are relevant to your subject.  Results are returned in a relevancy ranked order. You can change the ranking to date if you wish.
     
  3. To improve the relevancy of your search results, enclose phrases in "quotation marks".  For example:  "British Columbia" or "global warming".
     
  4. Include the apostrophe.  For example, use "handmaid's tale" rather than "handmaids tale"
     
  5. To find variant endings for a word, use the * asterisk (truncation symbol.)  For example:  delinquen* finds delinquent, delinquents, delinquency
     
  6. To find books, e-books. videos or other items in the UFV library, refine your search by selecting "Catalogue only".  You can also limit to "Print books" if you want something to hold!
     
  7. To find scholarly journal articles, refine your search by selecting "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed)"
     
  8. You can refine a search by limiting to Language. However, be aware that many English language articles have not been tagged as English, so will be missing from your search results.
     
  9. Many items have direct links to retrieve the full text. For those that don't, use "Full Text Finder" to determine if UFV has the item in print or online.
     
  10. To add in more Canadian content, explore the "Continue Search" on the right side of the screen.

System Requirements

In order to effectively use all EBSCOhost features, the minimum browser requirements are Internet Explorer 7.0, Firefox 8.0, Google Chrome 16, and Safari 5.1 (for Macintosh). You must also have Adobe ® Reader® installed to view the PDF Full Text files. If you are using Visual Search, you must also install   Adobe ® Flash Player 8.0 or higher.

 

Custom made UFV tutorials:

Finding Books and Videos in the UFV Library

Limiting Your Library Search to Ebooks and Streaming Videos

Finding Your Article Using Full Text Finder

 

Tutorials from the service provider:

Access Research Databases from Home

Books on opinion polls

Below are select titles that look at the design of public surveys, and analyse the relationship between public policy and opinion polls. They will help you interpret the results of polls and perhaps come up with a different interpretation or analysis than what’s presented in the media. 

Looking for Scholarly Articles on Vaccine Acceptance

Since the topic of COVID-19 immunization is quite new, it is less likely that you’ll find scholarly journal articles analysing opinion polls on vaccine acceptance for this specific virus. However, this topic has been studied in-depth for numerous other diseases, and relevant articles are available through the library’s databases. Useful search terms include:

  • COVID-19
  • COVID-19 pandemic
  • COVID-19 vaccine
  • News, opinion and commentary
  • Public opinion polls
  • Vaccine acceptance
  • Vaccine hesitancy
  • Parental attitudes
  • Polls & surveys
  • Risk perception
  • Canada
  • British Columbia

Here is a list of databases:

Research databases
Limit Your Results

AND, OR and NOT: Using Boolean operators


 

Quotation marks: Notice that both “pet therapy” and “animal visitation program” are in quotation marks. This forces the database to search for articles where the words in the given phrase appear in that exact order. 

AND: When using Advanced Search, the database allows you to incorporate multiple search terms. The terms are connected by the AND operator within a drop-down menu. Using AND tells the database to only retrieve contents that incorporate all the ideas entered.

OR: Use OR between terms when there are multiple ways of expressing the same concept. You can also use OR to incorporate concepts that are different, but still within the same scope as your topic; for example, “architectural design” OR “urban design.” In the screen capture above, OR is connecting the two similar search terms: “pet therapy” and “animal visitation program.”

NOT: This tells the database to ignore (i.e. not retrieve) results that contain certain key terms often associated with similar concepts; for example, salsa NOT dancing, or “postpartum disorder” NOT depression. In the image below, NOT has been selected in the drop-down menu:


 

News Media Sources

Here are some links to the major Canadian news media sources available through the UFV library, using your myUFV login. These links allow you to access articles behind paywalls, and browse online newspapers without seeing any advertisements. This is especially useful for news articles from The Globe and Mail; many are otherwise only available through paid subscriptions. You can also use Canadian Major Dailies to search for articles from major Canadian newspapers. 

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