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Humanities Abstracts |
"Humanities Abstracts features articles, book reviews, interviews, obituaries, bibliographies, original works of fiction (including dramas and poems), and reviews of plays and television and radio programs. It excludes editorials, letters to the editor, news, ephemeral announcements, cartoons, and advertising. It contains in each record a bibliographic citation for an article, book review, or other item in a journal."
Humanities abstracts indexes over 465 journals from 1984 to the present (updated monthly) covering the following topics:
Click here to go to the Humanities Abstracts database.
Some Search Tips
What Terms do I Use?
Quick search?
Keyword Search:
You can just type in terms relevant to your search topic in the boxes.
Ex. For articles on Disneyland, you might try typing "disneyland" in the Search For box.
More involved search?
:Index
Humanities Abstracts has an Index of terms used to describe articles in the database. In order to get the most accurate and targeted search results, use these terms.
First choose the type of term you want to search in the pull down menu next to the search box.
Then click the index icon to the right of that.
Ex. If you wanted to find articles on michelangelo, you could choose Named Person Phrase in the menu, then click the index icon. Then type "michelangelo" in the "browse for" box and find that in Humanities Abstraces the term you would use "michelangelo buonarotti" as your search term and that there are 50 articles indexed with this term.
How do I type the terms in?
If you are using index terms, just click the term as given to you in the index. If you are doing a keyword search you can use the following tools:
Boolean Operators:
Use these between your search terms to define what you want in your results.
AND - This limits your results to articles that contain BOTH of your search terms. ex. diabetes AND nursing
OR - This expands your results to include articles that contain EITHER of your search terms. ex. babies OR infants
NOT - This limits your results to articles that contain your first term BUT NOT your second. ex. nursing NOT obstetrics
Truncation:
The symbol for truncation in Reader's Guide Abstracts is the asterisk ( * ). Using this symbol at the end of a search term will look for all varying endings of that word.
ex. comput* will find computing, computers, computation etc.Proximation:
If you want to search a phrase, simply put the terms in quotation marks.
ex. Long Beach will get you any article with the word long and the word beach. "Long Beach" (in quotes) will get you only articles with Long Beach as a phrase.
How do I get my article?
Once you have a citation (What is a citation?) for an article you want to see, you can search for the source in COAST.
You may find the article electronically in COAST. In the COAST Journals search, use option 2: electronic full-text journals. Search using the journal title, not the article title. Make sure you note which year, volume, and issue number of the journal you need from the citation.If the journal is not available electronically, get the article in paper:
In the COAST Journals search, use Option 1: COAST for print or microforms. If the journal is available in print at CSULB, you will have to come to the library to photocopy it. Make sure you write down the ENTIRE citation (author, title, journal title, volume, number, year, pages) from the database and the location and call number of the journal from COAST.If it is not available electronically or in print at CSULB you can still request the article through Interlibrary Loan. This gets the article from another library either in print or electronically and takes 5-7 working days. So be sure to start your research early! If you are in a hurry, you can check other nearby library's catalogs and possibly go to that library to get the article.
To print, e-mail, or save:
Check the box next to the articles you are interested in. This marks them. Then click on "Marked Records" button at the top of the page. You can then click the Print or Email button at the top of the page. To save to disk click the Export button at the top of the page. Select Text File and click export. In the window that pops up, click save, and then select the floppy drive in the "save in" menu.
This page created by
Catherine Outten, Librarian Intern
University Library, California State University, Long Beach
April 2004
