Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

MEL’s Database of the Week for 1/21/11

January 21st, 2011

Welcome to Database of the Week — a feature from the Management & Economics Library (MEL). These database snapshots will give you basic information about our most relevant and beneficial online resources.

If you have a suggestion for a topic or a database that should be promoted, please let us know.

This Week’s Featured Database: Dissertations & Theses, from Proquest.

Link: www.lib.purdue.edu/mel, in the pull down Quick Access to Business Databases alpha list right below the Libraries’ search box.

Description/focus: Dissertations & Theses provides access to these works from graduate schools around the world.

Start with this hint: The Dissertations & Theses search uses the same Proquest interface available in their other products, with the options for Key fields + text the essential dissertation elements.  In addition to author, title, and subject, you can search for the degree, department, or advisor.  A sample search for social networks as a key term, and economics as a subject and Purdue University as the school, yields 40 results. Remove Purdue as a search parameter and the number of hits increases to 3495.  This expanded list displays papers that are available for immediate download to Purdue faculty, staff and students, as well as those that are not included in our subscription but can be obtained through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).

Other common tools available in this database: save selected hits online for later retrieval; some fulltext; citation help; suggestions for specific subjects; filters for elements such as location, language, school name; email selected hits to yourself; alerts or RSS feed; limit by date; option to sort by date or relevance.  For use of these tools in this database, contact Mary Dugan.

Why you should know this database: The Dissertations & Theses available for immediate download to Purdue has increased to include the Big 10 schools and many others.

How this database can be integrated into the curriculum: Now that dissertations must be submitted electronically, students can easily include dissertations and theses as they research topics for a semester research paper or for their own graduate research.

Cost: For annual subscription information, contact Mary Dugan.

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Database of the Week comes to you from the Management & Economics Library (MEL). Our intent is to give you a brief introduction to a database that you may not know.  If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact kranlib@purdue.edu.  Database of the Week is archived  at https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/MGMT/.  For more Purdue Libraries news, follow us on Twitter (@PurdueLibraries).