Communications and Mass Media Complete opens to a Google-like search box

Enter your search terms and click the search button. To search for a phrase, put quotation marks around it.  For example, to search for healthy eating, enter "healthy eating". As you start typing, you may see, just like Google again, suggested searches appear below the search box. These may give you some ideas for different searches.

Search Options

Below the search box, there are three buttons. These are options you can use to fine tune your search. You don't have to use them, but might be worth trying if you get too many results.

These options are:

• Full Text - limit your results to only those for which the full-text of the article is available
• Peer-Review - limit your results to only those which have been peer-reviewed, so, scholarly material only
• All Time - limit your results by time period
  • All time
  • Past 12 months
  • Past 5 years
  • Past 10 years

You cannot select any custom time period here.

Full Text is an important limiter because if you don't use it, you'll see lots of results where there's just the detail page with title and abstract only. If you want to read the whole of an article that's one of your search results, tick the Full-Text box to ensure that all results have the full text available.

If you are looking for scholarly/academic sources (and this may be specified in your coursework/assignment instructions), tick the Peer-Review box to make sure that all your results come from scholarly information sources.

By default, Full Text and Peer Reviewed are switched off (white). To switch them on, click the button. When they are active, the buttons turn light blue