The Rasmuson Connection

Getting primary literature without leaving your computer, UAF's Rasmuson Library.

The electronic and on-line capabilities of our library are awesome. Today, most students easily use electronic search engines, but below I did a step by step guide in case you need a jump-start. Also, I put in some comments about literature that you might find helpful. So just split your screen and see if you don't get similar results.

First, go to the library web site (that's formally the

Elmer E. Rasmuson Library

, if you need to distinguish it from our other libraries.)

http://library.uaf.edu/ and see:

The page opens with the Articles & Databases menu open. Note there are three other menus below that.
 

 

Here I typed "fracking into the search box. Note this will search all of Academic Search Premier finding articles from many sources, such as newspapers, magazines, and such.

 

  
 

 

Hit the Search button

 

  
 

t \

I got 4,094 "hits" on fracking. Too many, of course.

 

  
 
So now I'll refine the research and type BTEX into the first "and" box and from the "select a field" I will hit AB for Abstract.  
 
   

 

That's much better, only 7 hits for BTEX and fracking. From this screen, I can directly download a pdf file for one articles or I can hit the little bear and the "find it" button. No telling where that leads, but often to the library's Interlibrary Loan department (ILL; http://library.uaf.edu/ill ) they are very handy and you can get copies of almost any article or book you want. A pdf of a journal article often takes only a day or two. Books can take longer.

 

  
 

 

An alternate approach, if you expect to find the article in a particular journal, is to go back to the library entry page and click on Journal Title. You can limit your results to just "peer reviewed," that is scientific journals and not popular media.

 

  
 

 

Here I've just typed in "toxicology" and got a list of 123 journals that have the word "toxicology"in their title.

 

 
 

 

Here I've typed in the name of an actual journal, and found the journal. Note I can search within the journal or go to "full text access"Here I typed in the name of the publication, Critical Reviews in Toxicology, next I'll search within that publication

 

  

 

 

 

However, note in the fine print, they only have from 2002 to 2016 in their files AND the last 18 months is "embargoed," meaning you can't get it. For either case, you can go to ILL and they can get it for you.

 

  
 

 

So now I have 18 articles all in that journal.