General OneFile (InfoTrac)

General OneFile lists citations and summaries of most articles and entire text of some articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers.  All subjects are covered.  Periodicals included are:

• social science journals
• humanities journals
• science and technology journals
• national news periodicals
• general interest magazines
• The New York Times

General OneFile covers items published from 1980 to the present.  The New York Times is covered for the current six months only.

(Please note that General OneFile may be searched simultaneously with Academic OneFile by using Gale PowerSearch).

You may access General OneFile from anywhere with a valid APSU ID.

How To Search General OneFile

SEARCH TYPES: There are 4 search types: basic, subject guide, publication, and advanced.

• In an advanced search, there are 3 search boxes (you can add more rows) where you enter terms that relate to your research topic.

There are pull-down menus where you select the ‘index’ to search. The default is Keyword, but there are many to choose from, including author, subject, document title, person, word count, etc.



• In a basic search, there is a single box where you can enter terms that relate to your research topic. Search for terms as keywords (in article titles, subjects, abstracts), as subjects, or as full text (anywhere in article). Example: drunk driving.
   

• In a subject guide search, the term(s) you enter in the search box are mapped against an online thesaurus and relevant matches are displayed. If you type the words DUI or DWI or drunk driving in a subject guide search, you will see that the preferred term is driving while intoxicated. Often you will see subdivisions and related subjects to browse through.

Subdivisions target more specific aspects of a subject; e.g., case studies, forecasts and trends, prevention, public opinion, research, social policy, statistics. Related subjects are classified into broader or narrower terms.
 

• In a publication search, you look for articles from a known publication; e.g., Time or Newsweek. You see coverage dates and a listing of available issues to browse. You can also limit a search by publication title(s).
  
  Wildcards: An asterisk (*) stands for any number of characters, including none, and is especially useful when you want to find all words that share the same root. A single question mark ?stands for exactly one character (wom?n to match women or woman) while multiple question marks stand for an equivalent number of characters. An exclamation point (!) stands for one or no characters and is especially useful when you want to match the singular and plural of a word but not other forms or, when used inside a word, to match certain variant spellings. For example, colo!r matches both color (American) and colour (British). THE RESULTS: There are several pre-defined ways to refine the results of a search. Documents with full-text: Complete text is immediately available online via InfoTrac, indicated as full-text, full-text with graphics, or PDF. A drawback is the possibility that you eliminate important articles. The text of articles labeled abstract or citation are not online through InfoTrac, but may be online elsewhere. The "Search for Full Text" link connects with the Library’s Article Linker system where you can see if full-text for the article is available elsewhere. Peer-reviewed publications: Scholarly publications, sometimes called refereed Documents with images: Results will include graphics. InfoMarks: InfoMarks are persistent links to specific documents or to a search strategy that can be run later for updated results. Article links have a unique document ID that is part of the InfoMark string. They can be copied-and-pasted into web browsers, emailed, or set as bookmarks.

SEARCH RESULTS: Results are organized into tab groups – content areas that contain similar types of documents.

There are 4 tabs: Magazines & Journals, Reference, News (from newspapers and newswires), and Multimedia. Not every tab may contain items.

VIEW, MARK, PROCESS RESULTS: Your search results display in reverse publication date order, although they can be sorted by relevance instead.

The basic bibliographic information, full text indicator (full-text, full-text with graphics , abstract, citation) and document type (article, brief article, book review, author abstract, case note, column, cover story, editorial, interview, obituary) are listed.. Records display in MLA format.