How To Use Academic OneFile: Home

Before You Begin

To learn how to access the college's research databases or enter your college login, go to How To Access Library Databases.

To access Academic OneFile:

1. Go to the Online Library at http://www.esc.edu/library
2. Click "Article Databases"
3. Scroll down to "Academic OneFile" and click 
4. Log in with your college username and password

Basic Search

As soon as you log in, you are at the Basic Search page. In the search box, you can enter your article title, author or the keywords you have chosen for your topic.

Basic Search Tips:

• Put quotation marks around a phrase so that ebrary knows to search those words as one unit rather than separately.
• Use AND between keywords to search for books containing both terms.
• Use OR between keywords to search for books containing either term.

You can also use the checkboxes beneath the search box to:

• Limit your search results to ones with full-text in this database. Be cautious about doing this because you might be able to find those articles in our other databases.
• Limit your search to peer reviewed (scholarly) articles.
• Limit your search to articles with images. This is useful if you're looking for a chart or graph or a photograph of a person, event or phenomenon.

‌Advanced Search

To get to Advanced Search, click the Advanced Search link in the orange menu at the top of the page. 

1. Pull-down menus at the far left let you choose to join keywords in those boxes with AND, OR or NOT.
2. Pull-down menus immediately to the left of the search boxes let you choose what field you want to search for your keywords:
   • Keyword - searches the author, title, subject terms, and abstract.
   • Entire Document - searches all of that, plus the full-text of the article.
   • Subject - searches for your terms in the database's controlled vocabulary. 
   • Author - self-explanatory.
3. Checkboxes allow you to limit your search to:
   • Full-text articles.
   • Peer reviewed articles.
   • Documents that have images.
4. Other features:
   • You can limit your search to documents published within a certain date range. It is set to All Dates by default. The boxes where you put in the date range only appear once you click Before, On, After or Between.
   • You can also search by document type. 
5. There is a special Publication Title search box at the bottom to use if you want to search the article title. 

Results List

The search results are in the big middle column and organized with the most recent ones first. If there is more than one page of search results, you can click arrows at the top and bottom of the page to go through the pages of results.

1. At the top of the column on the left of the page, you can search within results and limit your results to only full-text, only peer-reviewed, or only documents with images.
2. Underneath that, you have options to limit your results by subject, document type (article, book review, biography, etc.) or journal title.
3. To the right of the title it tells you what kind of document it is (book review, article, report, etc.)
4. Click the title to get to the article information.
5. To open the full-text article, click the tiny page icon (HTML full-text) or the tiny page with a red squiggle icon (PDF full-text).

Viewing An Article

• Links to the full text will be in the results list, below the title of the article
• The gray "page" icon indicates HTML full text
• The icon with the red outline and squiggle indicates PDF full text (a scanned image of the original print article)
• Click the PDF icon to view the article in a new window. Be sure your pop-up blocker is set to accept pop-ups from OneFile. From there, you can print the article or save it to your computer or a thumb drive using the icons across the top of the article.
• Not all of the articles have full text in this database, but many do.