Communication Source

There’s a new database on the block, EBSCO’s Communication Source. It will seem like an old friend because it looks exactly like Communication and Mass Media Complete (CMMC) and Communication Abstracts (CA) if you were used to those. For the most part, Communication Source is just a combination of these two. No learning curve! 

As most of you know, Penn carried subscriptions to both CMMC and CA when they were owned by different companies (EBSCO and Sage Publications respectively). After EBSCO bought Communication Abstracts it was possible to search the two at once since they were on the same platform. Now, however, it’s even easier because there is only one file, Communication Source.

As for new material, there are 160 journal titles in Source that are not in CMMC or CA, many of them on the linguistic side but there are also these, to name a few: Arab Media & Society, Central European Journal of Communication, Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics, Global Media Journal: German Edition, Iowa Journal of Communication, Javnost: The Public, Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies, Public Communication Review, Signs and Society. A full coverage list is available here.

Communication Source is the premier research database for the field offering abstracts and indexing as well as full-text content from publications worldwide pertaining to communication, linguistics, rhetoric and discourse, speech-language disorders, media and cultural studies. It covers both academic and industry/trade literature.  

Content Includes:

• Active full text for more than 600 journals
• Indexing and abstracting for over 1,000 core titles
• Subject-specific, browsable thesaurus featuring 4,528 preferred and 8,528 non-preferred terms
• Coverage dating back to 1915