Central Oregon
Community College
LIBRARY 127
 

Finding Newspaper Articles using the Oregonian  Database

BACKGROUND ON THE OREGONIAN:

The Oregonian database offers full text articles from 1988 to the present.   We have The Oregonian newspaper available on microfilm from 1862 to 2001; a microform index is available for portions of those years.

SEARCHING THE OREGONIAN:

Use this link to get to our databases page  so that you can follow along with the Oregonian as you read this lesson.  First, choose News from the subject pull down menu,  then click on Oregonian.  We subscribe to The Oregonian via the online database provider Lexis Nexis.  The Nexis Lexis folks also publish a general national and world news source titled Academic Universe, also available from the News databases listing from the COCC Library webpage. 

Look for the link to the Oregonian and click on it.  The search form that you see at this point is the basic search form. It looks like this:

 This form allows use to use boolean commands and truncation.   Type in your search words and then hit the button.  Once you get to the results list, you simply click on the linked articles.    Look for the icons (upper right hand of the screen) to print, email or save an article.  Pretty simple and pretty wonderful, isn't it?   Oh, and did I mention that this resource provides FULL TEXT for the Oregonian? Unfortunately, however, product does not include photos or other images. 

 ADVANCED SEARCHING ON The Oregonian:
 You are well on your way to becoming an experienced researcher and you'll have to remember to always check those help screens.  The help link is in the upper right hand corner of the page.  

BOOLEAN AND PROXIMITY COMMANDS:

Here's a brief review of boolean and proximity commands for the  Lexis Nexis Oregonian database.  Pay attention--some of these commands are a little different from those used in  EBSCO databases!  Note:  a proximity command lets you search for two words that are close (that is, in proximity) to each other. 

Using the singular word form will retrieve the singular, plural, and possessive forms of most words. For example, city would find city, cities, city's, and cities'

!--truncation Use an exclamation mark (!) to truncate a word to find all the words made by adding letters to the end of it. For example, acqui! would find variations on the term acquire such as acquires, acquired, acquiring, and acquisition.

  ?--wildcard (stands for any letter within a word)

AND--combines words

OR--links synonyms

AND NOT--disqualifies words

W/n--Use the W/n connector to find documents with search words that appear within "n" words of each other. The value of "n" can be any number up to 255. Use W/n to join words and phrases that express parts of a single idea or to join closely-associated ideas.

Words or phrases linked by W/n must be in the same segment (a specific part of a document). Either word may appear first.

Specifying the value of "n"
There is no magic formula for choosing the value of n, but these guidelines may prove useful:

PRE/n --

Use the PRE/n connector to find documents in which the first search word precedes the second by not more than the stated number of words. As with W/n, both words must be in the same segment.

For example, t he following search finds documents in which "pay" precedes "television" by three or fewer words:

pay PRE/3 television

NOTE: find more details about searching Lexis Nexis databases using the Help feature (upper right hand corner) or the "Learn More About..." feature (left hand side of the screen.)