Political Science Complete is a database that 
collects articles on politics, government, and 
current events.
It's useful for Political Science papers, and also 
for history classes involving governance.
Political Science Complete is one of the 
EBSCO databases, which means the interface 
and the way you search in it
is going to be basically the same as any other 
EBSCO database.
On the opening page of the database you can 
set up your search. 
Two buttons that you may use are the Linked 
Full Text, used when your assignment is due 
within a week), and the Peer-Reviewed button, 
used when a professor requires Peer-Reviewed 
Articles.
Once you've set your options, you can search 
using the box above. Enter your search terms in 
the box.  
At the end of this tutorial, there's a link to a 
tutorial on how to construct a good search.
The number of articles that your search found is 
listed in the center next to "Search Results"
You can use the buttons on the left to narrow 
down that number; select the options that apply 
to your search 
(such as the range of publication dates or the 
type of publication) and wait for the update. The 
subjects are particularly useful for this because 
they are tags that describe the article: when you 
search for keywords, you are just finding articles 
with those words written in them.   
If you don't like your results after using any limit, 
just click on the little X next to that limit and the 
database will remove it from the search.
To learn more about an article, click on its title.
This brings us to the full record, which provides 
a lot of information.
At the top you will find the citation information, 
including the article title and author.
The source line contains the journal title, volume 
number, issue number and page numbers of the 
article.
All of this information will be important when you 
complete your bibliography.
There're a couple of ways to get a sense of what 
a particular article is about before you read the 
actual article.
The subject terms are tags that describe the 
actual subject of the article; they are the same 
tags that you saw earlier in the limits on the left.
The abstract is a short summary of the article. 
Skimming the abstract is the best method of 
finding whether an article is relevant to you.
There are two places you can look to find the full 
text of an article. If you are in the full record, 
look on the upper left side of the page.
If you are in the list of articles, look at the 
bottom of each record.
If there is a “Full Text” link under the title, click 
the link to read the entire article.  
The HTML Full Text link will provide a web 
version of the article.  
The PDF Full Text link will provide a scanned 
copy of the original  article.  
Choose the link called “Check for full text 
availability” to find the full text of the article in 
another database or in print.
If the article is not available in full text, 
choose the link labeled “request through 
interlibrary loan.” 
The library staff will try to find the article for you 
in another library.
There are a couple of useful buttons on the right 
side of the article screen. In particular, you can 
email an article to yourself, 
and if full text is available it will come as an 
attachment with the email. You can 
automatically get the citation for an article 
(though you should double check it for 
correctness), and you can click the folder icon 
to save the article online.
For details on how to use the folder, searching 
strategies, and more, click on these links.
