One of the first Databases I ever became proficient with was Academic Search Premier, back when I was in library school I used it both for assisting patrons during my internship at an academic library and also for my personal research for classes.
With that history I gave into the temptation to see another face of the Premier database line from EBSCO, and chose MasterFile Premier. I was impressed to find some of my favorite research magazines offered with many articles in full text, and largely impressed in general.
My disappointment in this process was fairly small, and was focused mostly when it came to browsing the publications included. Namely in that the browsing view, while subdivided by first letter, has no 'next page' arrow within the scope of that letter. That is to say, publications listed that begin with the letter 'D' are listed in alphabetical order up to "Dan", and then the rest are completely unbrowsable until the letter 'E' takes over. If you know the publication to search for it can be found easily through search, but I would have been a lot happier to see a fully-fledged browsing feature that let patrons discover new titles.
I used the fallback question of Zinc in Food and immediately found that there has been a wealth of information written on the topic, particularly on the divide between food-born zinc supplements versus a direct liquid supplement. There were also prominent discussions on ways to enrich foods with zinc in order to help in areas that have chronically underweight children. This is more or less exactly the sort of thing I had hoped to find. As always, EBSCO provides excellent filter options, with the after-the-search options to restrict the results to Peer-reviewed or full-text titles being of particular note and merit for students.
I'm glad that you searched for the zinc topic because I was curious later how that had turned out. I think the success of these searches has a great deal to do with the topic. When I searched for articles about how students choose fashion for school and the social implications, there was very little. But a search for information about the relationship between sports and academics yielded better results. And keyword choice with the right combination of limiters is important, isn't it!
ReplyDelete