Students clueless about how to use Academic Search Premier, a search engine for online scholarly publications, may attend a workshop at Hodges Library on Thursday.

According to the Hodges Library Web site, Academic Search Premier is a multidisciplinary database that catalogues many of the articles in more than 3,900 scholarly publications, including more than 3,000 peer-reviewed journals.

It is a general, multi-purpose research database, said one UT librarian.

“Academic Search Premier is a database of articles from a wide assortment of subject areas,” Margaret Casado, distance education and outreach services librarian, said. “Our workshop will focus on using Academic Search Premier to its full advantage.”

Students, faculty and staff can use Academic Search Premier to find the full text of many valuable academic and peer-reviewed articles in almost all areas of study, Casado said. The Academic Search Premier is much more scholarly sound than popular search engines such as Google or Yahoo, she said.

“Search engines find materials readily and freely available on the Internet,” Casado said, “and the quality of what we find using a search engine is not guaranteed. Students have to be very selective using material found with a search engine. This database retrieves articles from journals that have already appeared in print, so the student is able to take for granted the reliability of the information and focus on the reading and thinking that will go into the study of the topic.”

Some students at UT do not know what the Academic Search Premier is.

“It’s a program that can be used for research is my only guess,” said Trevor Ratliff, undecided freshman.

Students can access the search engine by going to http://www.lib.utk.edu/databases/ and clicking on “General Topics.” It is the first database listed.

Students may sign up for the workshop at http://www.lib.utk.edu/instruct/workshop.

Two tutorial sessions will be held. The first session is Thursday at 1 p.m. The second session is at 10 a.m. on October 22 . Both will be held in Room 211 of Hodges Library.