Find It @BALL STATE
Most of the time, if you’re accessing Google Scholar on campus, it will be configured to point at University Libraries resources as well as being Find It @BALL STATE-enabled.
“Find It @ BALL STATE-enabled” means that Google Scholar, Biological Abstracts, or whatever database you might be using has been connected to “link resolver” software that will search all the databases in a specified list for full-text versions of articles you may find in sources that do not offer full-text or for items in databases for which we have no subscription.
Currently, you can activate this Find It @ BALL STATE link-resolver by clicking the Find It @ BALL STATE button (seen above) or link beside or beneath article/book citations. Find It @ BALL STATE-enabled databases will also be indicated on the Databases list with a small icon.
On occasion, Find It @ BALL STATE will not be able to find a full-text version of your article but it will give you the option for requesting it via our ILL services (see the Interlibrary Loan subtab under the Research/Library Resources tab).
For more information, consult the LibKey Nomad LibGuide.
Interlibrary Loan (ILL)
If you cannot find your article through BSU sources then you might try using Interlibrary Loan (ILL). This is a service through which you can borrow materials that BSU does not have from another library that does.
For instance, if you wanted an article from Agricultural Administration you would find that BSU does not own it but a quick search in WorldCat reveals that Purdue University does have it. Go to the ILL link and login to ILLiad using your BSU username and password. The first time you do so you will be required to register so that the system can know where, to whom, and how you prefer your materials delivered. Find the correct form, fill in the information, and then submit the form.
You should receive email notices when your document comes in- in fact, most articles are now delivered electronically via your email- you’ll get your article within a few days time right in your inbox. ILLiad also allows you to check on the progress of your request by logging back in and glancing at the Outstanding Requests table on the main page.
You can also use Find It @ BALL STATE and Citation Linker to connect to ILL as well. If you use this pathway, you will still need to log in but, once you do, the appropriate form will be automatically filled out for you.
ILL requests can, on occasion, take up to several weeks to process (ie for books and other print materials) but it’s usually a matter of 2-5 days for articles delivered electronically right to your inbox as PDF files.
You can find out more at the FAQ page.
Recommended research tools
AI as a topic represents a highly diverse field of study that uses information from many different disciplines, not just computer science. Some fields that contribute to AI research include psychology, engineering, robotics, neurobiology, linguistics, and mathematics. As the list below indicates, this means that to do comprehensive research on AI, you will need to look at many disparate and seemingly unrelated databases.
However, just because it doesn’t say ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE or MATHEMATICS or TECHNOLOGY doesn’t mean it can’t be relevant to what you are doing. Do not neglect a source because it does not seem to fit your conception of what you want.
Ball State University Libraries provides access to authoritative and accurate sources of information on peer-reviewed and otherwise scholarly publications through the Articles & Databases page (Databases and interfaces (ie aggregators)). Remember that part of your tuition goes to pay for such resources and services- you do have a subscription to journals like Nature through your status as a student at Ball State.
The Articles & Databases pages can be viewed in a couple of different ways. You can look at an A-Z list of all the databases we offer access to or you can choose a subject (e.g. Science or Technology) and just look at databases relevant to your field of interest.
For instance, go to the Articles & Databases page and click the Subject menu box. Then click on the Science menu item. This will bring up only those databases concerned with the hard sciences including mathematics. Another area that might be of use is Technology.
Beginning/Discovery Tools:
- BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine This link opens in a new window BASE is a deep web search engine especially for academic open access web resources. It collects, normalizes, and indexes data from more than 2,700 sources and includes more 50 million documents. You can access the full text of about 75% of the indexed documents.BASE contains parts of the web which are ignored by commercial search engines or get lost in the vast quantity of hits. Unlike ordinary web search engines BASE has many useful refinements.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window JSTOR allows you to search across approximately 2,000 journal titles from more than 50 disciplines. It contains complete backfiles of scholarly journals starting with the first issues, many of which date back from the 1800s. Although the majority of titles do not have the most recent 3 to 5 years available in full text, there are some which have the current issues available.Note: Additional content has been permanently added to JSTOR, including archived journal collections and primary resources. Searches performed using the databases page link will include results from the additional sources, as will the link above.
- OneSearch This link opens in a new window OneSearch is a tool that cross searches much of the content our databases and other online sources. You can search across many collections in one search box simplifying the resource discovery process.
- ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window ScienceDirect offers more than a quarter of the world's scientific, medical and technical information online. More than 2,000 peer-reviewed journals. Hundreds of book series, handbooks and reference works. Note: Find It @ BALL STATE appears in the article record rather than on the results list.
- SciFindern This link opens in a new window Key database for science research. Chemistry-focused but includes references from Medline as well. Users may search by typical means (e.g. keyword, author, title, etc.) but also by chemical structure.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new window Cross searching of Science Citation Index Expanded back to 1973, Social Sciences Citation Index back to 1981/82, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index back to 1976.
- WorldCat This link opens in a new window WorldCat is the collected catalog of materials (such as books) owned by over 54,000 libraries worldwide. Great for exhaustive searches for books on a topic. Look for the "Request via interlibrary loan" in WorldCat records to borrow items from other libraries using Interlibrary Loan. Use the "Check OneSearch" link in the record to see if we have book first.
More Focuses/In-Depth Tools:
- ACM Digital Library This link opens in a new window More than 6,800 titles, including ACM publications, journals, magazines, books, conference proceedings, dissertations and theses. Bibliographic information and abstracts are included along with the full text. Includes articles published in ACM periodicals and proceedings since its founding in 1947.
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new window Key database in the field of psychology. Includes information of use to psychologists, students, and professionals in related fields such as psychiatry, management, business, and education, social science, neuroscience, law, medicine, and social work.
- Applied Science & Technology Index This link opens in a new window Key database in the fields of engineering, computer science, and other applied sciences. Contains some full text and linked full text. More than 480 of it nearly 800 titles are peer reviewed. Subjects include; applied mathematics, civil engineering, communication & information technology, optical & neural computing, and physics.
- Computing Reviews This link opens in a new window Computing Reviews provides partial reviews of current computing research in all sub-disciplines. Topics of research reviewed include, computer system organization, general literature, software, theory of computation, mathematics of computation, information systems, interfaces, algebraic manipulation, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, image processing, pattern recognitions, simulation, modeling, text processing, computer applications, and computing milieux.
- IEEE Xplore Digital Library This link opens in a new window IEEE Xplore Digital Library has content from 179 IEEE journals as well as the Institution of Engineering and Technology publications. The database contains almost one-third of the world's current literature in electrical engineering, communications, and computer science. Also contains conference proceedings and approximately 2,500 active, archived and redline IEEE standards.
- Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) This link opens in a new window Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) covers all aspects of the study of language. All of the various fields of linguistics are included such as descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics. Contains some full text.
- MathSciNet This link opens in a new window MathSciNet is a key database for the literature of mathematics. It contains reviews of current mathematical literature and indexes literature back to the early 1800's. More than 100,000 reviews are added each year.
- MathSciNet via EBSCOhost This link opens in a new window MathSciNet (EBSCOhost) indexes Mathematical Reviews which provides professional reviews of current mathematical literature. Contains more than 3.2 million items with more than 100,000 items added each year.
- Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection This link opens in a new window Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection provides access to scholarly journals and magazines related to child development, cognitive science, educational psychology, and criminology.
General Research & Reference
- Annual Reviews This link opens in a new window This database provides comprehensive collections of critical reviews, ranging from the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Annual Review of Neuroscience to the Annual Review of Sociology.
- Oxford Reference Online This link opens in a new window Searchable and browsable collection of highly trusted reference books. Dictionaries and encyclopedias in Oxford Reference Online include general works, foreign-language works, and specialized subject works in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences.
- Science Reference Center This link opens in a new window Science Reference Center provides easy access to a wealth of full-text, science-oriented content. The database contains the full text for hundreds of science encyclopedias, reference books, periodicals and other reliable sources.
DOI (Digital Object Identifier)
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are special strings of numbers and letters that form a persistent link to individual publications. They are issued at the time of publication, much like an ISBN or a serial number. DOIs can be attached to a number of different publications, including journal articles, books and book chapters, conference papers, reports, and so on. The DOI system provides a technical and social infrastructure for the registration and use of persistent interoperable identifiers, called DOIs, for use on digital networks.
You may have already seen a DOI and not realised what it was – all DOIs start with “10.” and are ‘built’ according to the publisher and journal involved – for example, the DOI for the 2004 article “Post-fire survival and reproduction of rehabilitated and unburnt koalas” from the Elsevier-published journal Biological Conservation is 10.1016/j.biocon.2004.03.029.
You can think of DOIs as social security numbers for individual electronic files (ie journal articles or images) which means that the article can be tracked and found by this number as though you had typed in the full citation. DOIs act as permanent links to individual papers, documents, articles, abstracts, photographs, models, etc.
Most indexing services (ie databases/aggregators) use the DOI standard now and some citation styles like APA are beginning to require it if available. Some will allow you to search by the DOI (eg Web of Science, SciFindern) but you can also use OneSearch, dx.doi.org, DataCite, and CrossRef to “resolve” the link (i.e. find/retrieve the object in fulltext or original format).
In the Ball State University Libraries system, you can use Citation Linker to find fulltext articles with nothing more than a DOI: just copy and paste the DOI into the DOI field on the Citation Linker page and click submit. Find It @ BALL STATE will then search our databases for a fulltext version of the article in question or connect you to our Interlibrary Loan service to obtain it from another institution.