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Ethics in Journalism:
Finding Articles Using our Databases
The library offers quite a few databases that are useful for finding journal and newspaper articles on journalistic ethics, including the following:
Academic Search Premier
Business Source Premier
MAS Ultra - School Edition
PsycINFO
These databases can be accessed via the Electronic Research Database page. A researcher can simply click on the name of the database to link directly to it, or can click on the link that says EBSCO, and then choose any combination of these databases to be searched simultaneously. To do the latter, after clicking on the EBSCO link, simply place a check mark in each of the databases you wish to search, and then scroll to the bottom of the page and click Continue. This will open the EBSCO search interface where any number of databases can be searched in one session.
For example, if you were to search all six of the databases listed above simultaneously, you would get over 2642 hits (as of 3/29/04). When the search interface comes up, run a search in the default fields (the EBSCO interface automatically defaults to this search so you don't have to change anything) using the following search terms: ethics and journalism. You can also run a search for the phrase journalistic ethics. Suppose you want to do so in only two databases, Academic Search Premier and Communication and Mass Media Complete. Begin by clicking on the EBSCO link, then check off those two databases and click Continue. Type in your search phrase and click Search. This search returns 1440 hits (as of 3/29/04). It is important to note that many of these hits will be available in either Full Text or Linked Full Text (to see what these terms mean, click on this link).
The other database that would be really useful for this search is Lexis Nexis Academic, which searches the major newspapers in the United States, such as the New York Times and Boston Globe, as well as some international newspapers. The link to this database can also be found on our Electronic Research Database page. Click it to get to the search interface, where you can run a Quick (Simple) News Search or a Guided (Advanced) News Search. You can run the Quick Search from the initial page of Lexis Nexis. Noting the example which indicates that you need to use quotation marks for phrase searches, type in journalistic ethics and use the drop down menu to tell the database that you wish to search back two years. This returns the maximum of 125 hits (as of 3/29/04), all of which are available Full Text. Adding a second search term (you do NOT use the boolean and in this database; you simply place a space between terms) or limiting the search to a shorter period of time will reduce this number of hits. To use the Guided News Search, click on that tab. Set your settings to General News, Major Papers, and enter the search terms ethics and journalism. You can set your search time limit using the pull down menu. We ran a search using this criteria, and set our time limit to All Available Dates to search back as far as we could. This returned too many hits, so we then specified a publication, the Boston Globe. This returned 81 hits (as of 3/29/04). By the same token, a Guided Search using the phrase journalistic ethics and limiting our search to the Boston Globe returned 10 hits. A careful researcher would run both searches and combine the results.
Finally, there is one more database you may want to check if you are looking for information, but it does not technically search articles. This database is called WorldCat and it searches for books in library catalogs worldwide. A keyword search in this database for the phrase journalistic ethics results in 1912 hits (including audio-visual materials), 1537 of which are books. These books, if not owned by the Ellender Memorial Library (if they are owned by the library, there will be an icon indicating this), can be accessed via Interlibrary Loan, and the Interlibrary Loan process can be completed online using this form. Getting a book through Interlibrary Loan, however, takes upwards to two weeks (a request can be filled within days, but this is not always the case), so you must begin your research early if you have a deadline.
Tony Fonseca
Electronic Resources / Reference Librarian
230 Ellender Memorial Library
Phone: 985-448-4675
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