Finding Articles About Your Company

Finding Articles about Your Company

The library’s periodical databases are a good place to find articles from newspapers, magazines and journals. The best choices for databases are: ProQuest Direct, ABI/Inform and Ethnic NewsWatch. All three databases are produced by the same company, ProQuest, so the search interface looks similar and the commands are the same.

Access these databases from the library’s home page: http://dept.sccd.ctc.edu/nslib/ Click on periodical databases, under Search for Articles.

The following examples shows a search for articles about diversity and Starbucks.

When searching a periodical database, choose two or three main keywords and combine them with Boolean operators (AND, OR.) For example:

AND Boolean Operator

starbucks and diversity

starbucks and multicultural

starbucks and corporate culture

starbucks and profile

Combining keywords with AND means that all the words have to appear in the article. Using AND narrows your search.

OR Boolean Operator

The OR operator is used to link synonyms or related terms. For example:

diversity or multicultural

diversity or minorities

diversity or multicultural*

The asterisk * after multicultural is called a truncation symbol. It will search for other forms of words with the same stem, for example:

multicultural

multiculturalism

Combining Search Terms and Boolean Operators – Nesting

You can combine search terms connected with OR and terms connected with AND. This is called nesting. For example:

starbucks and (diversity or multicultural*)

starbucks and (climate or corporate culture)

When combining terms and operators, enclose the terms linked with OR in parentheses. This tells the database to process that first and then combine it with the term(s) linked with AND.

Searching by Article Type

In any of the ProQuest databases, you can also specify the type of article. This is useful if your company is a very well known one where there are thousands of articles written about it. Article types include cover story, feature, interview, etc.

North Seattle Community College Library

http://dept.sccd.ctc.edu/nslib