Communication Sciences & Disorders
You can find journal articles in the field of communication sciences & disorders in a number of databases. The databases are grouped below based on their primary disciplinary coverage.
Medical/Scientific
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MEDLINE (Ebsco) This link opens in a new window
Indexes journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine.
Language/Communication
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Linguistics and language behavior abstracts This link opens in a new window
Indexes and abstracts scholarly works on linguistics and the study of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.
Educational/Psychology
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PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
Provides citations and summaries of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations in psychology, behavioral science, and mental health.
Structuring Your Search
Once you have your population and intervention concepts mapped out, it is simple to structure your search in the databases.
The databases communicate using Boolean Operators (AND, OR, and NOT).
First, you will take all of your terms for your population concept and add OR between each term. You'll also want to put concepts that are made up of two or more terms within quotation marks:
Population:
"Rett syndrome" OR "Rett's disorder" OR "Rett's Syndrome" OR "Cerebroatrophic Hyperammonemia"
Intervention:
"AAC" OR "Augmentative and Alternative Communication" OR "Augmentative and Alternative Communications Systems" OR "Communication Aids" OR "Communication Boards" OR "Speech Synthesizers" OR TDD OR "Text Telecommunication" OR "Eye-Tracking"
Next, you'll put each of your concepts in between parentheses, and put the Boolean Operator AND in between them. This tells the database that you want to find articles that use terms from both sets of concepts in combination with one another:
("Rett syndrome" OR "Rett's disorder" OR "Rett's Syndrome" OR "Cerebroatrophic Hyperammonemia") AND ("AAC" OR "Augmentative and Alternative Communication" OR "Augmentative and Alternative Communications Systems" OR "Communication Aids" OR "Communication Boards" OR "Speech Synthesizers" OR TDD OR "Text Telecommunication" OR "Eye-Tracking")
Often, a database will automatically break up the search into more than one box with the AND operator in between to help you in this process:
Refining Your Search
Once you hit "search" and start looking through the results, you can filter your results by date.
All of the databases listed above will have a way for you to filter for articles by date. Most of the time, these filters appear on the search results page along the left most column of the page. You may have to manually enter dates, or you may have to drag a curser to the correct date range. Utilizing the date filter will make it easy for you to select an article published in the last five years, which is a requirement for this assignment.
