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Mat-Su College: Biology

A guide for students taking Biology courses, particularly BIOL 102, at Mat-Su College.

How to get to Academic Search Premier

Academic Search Premier has millions of articles covering most academic subjects. It is a good place to start your research.

How do I use Academic Search Premier?

Academic Search Premier has a lot of buttons and search boxes. Don't be overwhelmed. Focus on the search bars at the top of the page. Enter your search terms on the first search bar and click "Search":

A screenshot of the Academic Search Premier interface showing the search boxes at the top of the page

You should then see a page that looks similar to this (minus the markings):

Screenshot of academic search premier results page

In this results page, you can narrow down your search results to items from scholarly journals by clicking the button on the left next to the text "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals" (indicated by 1).

You can narrow down by date by using the date slider (indicated by 2).

Finally, you can access the full text of articles by clicking "PDF Full Text" or "Check Library for Full Text" links (indicated by 3).

Clicking the title of an article will give you a detailed record with a summary (or abstract) of the article; information on when and where it was published, and who wrote it; and a link to quickly and automatically generate a citation (highlighted):

Screenshot of Academic Search Premier detailed result page

After clicking cite, you may need to scroll down a tiny way to see the APA-style citation:

Screenshot showing APA style citation obtained from clicking cite button in Academic Search Premier

Finding charts, tables, and graphs in Academic Search Premier

You can use Academic Search Premier to find charts, tables, and graphs.

First, click the "Images" link at the top of Academic Search Premier:

Images link at the top of Academic Search Premier

Now enter your search terms as you would normally. Before you do your search, click the checkboxes for graph, chart, diagram, or anything else you want. Now click search:

Academic Search Premier image search configured