Readers Guide Abstracts

Instructional Guides

Readers' Guide Abstracts

Reader's Guide Abstracts has abstracts of articles from over 300 popular magazines including Bon Appetit, Cosmopolitan, Ebony, Forbes, Fortune, and Wired. The abstracts date back to 1984 and are updated monthly. (An abstract is a short summary of an article.)

For complete up-to-date information on how to search Reader's Guide Abstracts, click the Help button in the gray tool bar at the top of the page in the database.

Click here to go to Reader's Guide 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:

Readers Guide Abstracts (RGA) 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 Disneyland, you could choose Named Company Phrase in the menu, then click the index icon. Then type "disneyland" in the "browse for" box and find that in RGA you would use "Disneyland anaheim calif" as your search term and that there are 33 articles indexed with this term. You would also see other nearby searches such as "disneyland paris" and "disneyland tokyo japan"

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 for an article you want to see, you can search for the magazine in COAST. (What is a citation?)

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 usually takes 7-10 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.

How do I print, e-mail, or save the citations?

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
University Library, California State University, Long Beach