General Science Abstracts

Overview

General Science Abstracts  is an index and abstract database created and maintained by the H.W. Wilson Company, and accessible through EBSCO Publishing.  This database covers a wide range of scientific articles from over 150 scholarly journals and popular science magazines published in the United States and Great Britain.  Indexing of articles is available dating back to 1984, and abstracts are available from 1993.  The variety of content would make General Science Abstracts of interest to academic and public libraries alike.

General Science Abstracts info page (click for larger view)

Searching

General Science Abstracts offers three search modes: basic, advanced, and expert.  The basic search utilizes keywords, authors, and titles.  The advanced search is essentially an expanded basic search that includes additional fields, such as Journal Name, Abstract, and Descriptors. The expert search allows for more sophisticated searching using a variety of operators and symbols.  The proximity operator ADJ is automatically inserted between search terms.  Other operators include the Boolean AND, OR, and NOT and proximity operators NEAR and W/#.  Truncation searches make use of the asterisk symbol (*) while wildcard searches use either the pound sign (#) or question mark (?), depending on how many characters are allowed in place of the sign.  Use # for exactly one letter, and ? for up to nine letters.

Once a search is completed, the user has a couple of options to further refine the results.  The results can be

·         ranked by relevance or date,

·         sorted by date, author, or title,

·         expanded through related works by the authors, or by the subject headings, or

·         limited to articles with access to the full text.

When an article is selected, the user has the option to save, print, or email it.

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Wilson General Science Abstracts Full Text Database Search Tips. (2000). Retrieved from Vietnam National University Library: http://www.vnulib.edu.vn:8080/HWWGSA/operators.nsp?view=HWWGSA

General Science Abstracts Tip Sheet. (2004, March 4). Retrieved from Richard Stockton College Library: http://intraweb.stockton.edu/eyos/library/content/Static/LibEducationPg/Database_Tips/General_Science_Abstracts.htm

Dialog, LLC. (2011). General Science Abstracts. Retrieved from http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/bl0098.html

EBSCO Industries, Inc. (2012). General Science Abstracts. Retrieved from EBSCO Publishing: http://www.ebscohost.com/public/general-science-abstracts