Using Sociological Abstracts Effectively and Expertly

Sociological Abstracts is the main index used for locating articles within scholarly publications in Sociology. Sociological Abstracts is a database that offers a variety of search options - from a broad keyword search to a high degree of control in searching. You'll have more success with your searching when you understand the options available.

Sociological Abstracts Records

A record describes an item in the database. Sociological Abstracts records are citations - descriptions of articles, conference proceedings, or book sections.

A citation includes the:

• title of the item,
• the author(s),
• the affiliation of the authors (where they work),
• the source (where it was published), and
• an abstract (description of the article).

There's also a link to to find the full text of the article.

Here is a screen shot of the beginning of a full record:

This is a citation for a journal article published in 2009, in volume 68, issue 1 of the journal Social Science & Medicine .

This citation includes an abstract, which describes the paper. Further down (not shown) are details about the language of the item (it isn't always in English), and the references used. It's a long record with a great deal of useful information.

When we search Sociological Abstracts our results are first presented in short form, so that many can fit on a screen. To see a full record for any item, we click on the title or .

Back to top.

Basic Search

A basic search searches for our keywords in the title, author, abstract, subjects, or full text of the references of an article. If you've assigned your own tags to an item, it will search those too. See the ProQuest Help page for Basic Search if you'd like more details.

It's a very broad search that often finds many items of limited value. The only control you have with this search is to limit your findings to "Peer reviewed" or "Scholarly journals". It's not the default search - you probably need to click on "Search" to bring up this screen.

Sometimes this is a good way to get started, and we can get ideas from our results to help us narrow down our search. However, we can control our results better by using a more specific Advanced Search. "Advanced Search" is usually the default search screen.

Back to top.

Advanced Search

An advanced search allows us to specify where we want our keywords to appear (what field they're in). This helps control the relevancy of our results. The default is "All Fields (CABS)" of each record. These search boxes can be joined with AND, OR, or NOT. (See the Keywords tutorial for an explanation of these operators.)

Click on the arrow beside "All fields" to select other locations to search: abstract, title, subjects, authors, affiliation, etc. There are many choices.

Some fields offer a list to choose from. If you select "Author - AU", an option is presented to see a list of all authors and choose the correct one.

The Advanced Search also provides us with a large selection of limitations that allow us to specify exactly what we need to find. We can limit a search by:

• Peer reviewed, Scholarly journals, or date range.
• Source Type: ie. Books, Conference Papers & Proceedings, Dissertations, Reports, and Scholarly journals.
• Document type: ie. Bibliography, Book Review.
• Language.

All of these are available on the Advanced Search page. Here's a screen capture of the limiters:

Back to top.

Subjects

The subjects used in Sociological Abstracts are very powerful because they use controlled vocabulary. A controlled vocabulary is a specified list of terms that can be used to describe an item. In this case the terms are controlled by the publisher (Sociological Abstracts) and applied consistently by scholarly staff who read an item and determine which terms should be applied. This is significant because we can be confident that the same terminology is applied in the same way, and it links relevant items.

We can use these subjects in 3 ways. We'll perform a search on "sex drive" to show how we can use the subject terms.
 

1. When we search for "sex drive" in "all fields", we find 705 results (citations). Below the number of results is a list of suggested subjects, like this:

These suggestions come from the authoritative list of subjects. If we like one, we can click on it to perform a brand new search, unrelated to the results we have with this search.

2. On the right side of the screen there's an option to narrow results to those with a specific subject. This tells us that, out of the 705 results found from our original search, there are: 75 items that also have the subject "sex differences", 66 items that also have the subject "females", 65 items that also have the subject "sex", etc. If we click on any of these subjects, we'll see a subset of our 705 results: those containing the term "sex drive" (from the original search) AND the subject we've chosen (eg. "sex differences").

3. Before we begin a search we can look at the Thesaurus for authoritative terms to use. See a link to "Thesaurus" beside the search box. It takes us to the thesaurus search, where we enter our term. In our example, we see there is NO subject for "sex drive", but there is a subject of "Sexual Arousal" and "Sexual Behavior". Under each subject, there are suggestions for broader, narrower, and related terms. Choose a term that looks good to you, and click "Add to search".

Back to top.

Lists of Terms

Even an index has indexes. It's a list of entries in a field of a record. We can look at the list to find the best terms to search for. In Sociological Abstracts there are lists for:

• author
• publication title (journal name)
• subject headings
• classification codes (broad topic areas)
• country of publication.

These lists appear as pop-ups when we select this field to search. They're helpful for ensuring we have the proper terminology to narrow our search.

Back to top.

Recent Searches

Sometimes we do so many different searches that we lose track of what we've done. After we've done at least one search, a link to "Recent Searches" appears that shows all the searches we've done in this session and how many items were found with each search. Use this feature to combine search results or review the results found previously.

We can use this information to:

• view results of a previous search again,
• combine searches using AND and OR,
• save searches in "My Research" to perform again later, or in another database, and
• set up an "alert" or "RSS Feed" to run this search regularly and have results sent to us.

Back to top.

Top of page.
Last Modified: March 1, 2012
Maintained by , Thomas J. Bata Library.