Contemporary Women's Issues (CWI) provides full-text access to thousands of reports and articles covering women's issues from 150 countries around the world. The CWI brings together information from the fields of sociology, psychology, health, education, and human rights. The CWI also indexes articles from journals, newsletters, research reports from non-profit groups, government and international agencies. The CWI is updated fortnightly, covers a period from 1992 to the present, and contains more than 35,000 records from 1,500 sources.

Contemporary Women's Issues (CWI) is available to current UT Arlington faculty & students via this web:

http://eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/fs-cwi.cgi

Searching

A truncation symbol used in Contemporary Women's Issues (CWI) to search for plural word forms is a plus sign (+). When this symbol is put at the end of a root word, the database will be searched for both the singular and the plural form of that word. For example, "girl+" will have the database searched for both "girl" or "girls." A phrase is indicated with quotation marks ("") so that words that are surrounded by quotation marks are searched as a single string. For example, "birth control" will be searched as a two word phrase.

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(women+ or woman+ or girl+ or famale+) AND (contraception or "birth control")

The first part of this statement will find material about females. The second part will look for the words "abortion" or "birth control". The AND then links the first set with the second. This should be an effective way to look for contraceptive issues facing women.

John Dillard, Social Sciences Librarian
dillard@uta.edu
cell: (817) 675-8962 - - office: (817) 272-7518