Associate Professor of Communication Dr. Emory Woodard, Area Coordinator of Media Studies

By Nate Haeberle-Gosweiler, graduate assistant for Communication and Marketing

“If I am very familiar with whatever it is that I am looking at, I will wade into the vast sea of the Communication EBSCO products,” Dr. Woodard said.

The tremendous breadth of these databases allows Dr. Woodard to explore a diversity of content related to his main search topic. In utilizing EBSCO’s “ability to expand and search multiple databases simultaneously,” one can effectively augment a general communication search query with additional databases such as the “Film and Television [Literature] Index, Business Source Premier, Social Sciences Index, Mental Measurements, or the Health and Psychosocial Instruments.”

Dr. Woodard is able to use Communication EBSCO’s “sophisticated keyword search process” to hone in on  applicable search results within a very large body of research after a few potential query revisions.

“Now, if I am assisting a student and I am looking into an area that is not familiar to me, or if I develop a new curiosity in something, I will go to the CIOS product, Com Abstracts,” he said.

The restricted information pool of the CIOS Com Abstracts (not to be confused with Communication Abstracts) is beneficial in providing search results solely from within communication journals without being overloaded by sources outside the scholarly communication literature.

Dr. Woodard finds the most success with CIOS Com Abstracts when he can simplify a query to a single keyword, giving him search returns that effectively indicate, “this is something that has been addressed in the communication discipline and this is how it has been addressed.”