Exploiting information: getting the most from the OU Library March 2016

Our session will cover.. Literature review and sources of help The importance of citations Keeping up to date Bibliographic management tools

A good literature review will.. 1.clarify your understanding of the field 2.explain the rationale for your research 3.evaluate the results of previous research 4.define key concepts and ideas 5.identify research in related areas that are generalizable or transferable to your topic 6.identify relevant methodological issues. 7.cover all important relevant literature 8.be up-to-date

Library

Using citations Helps measure the impact an article makes on the community at large Properly grounds the research through an appropriate review of the literature Considered to be one of the most reliable of resources in tracing the development of an idea across the multitude of disciplines that are part of our body of knowledge

The original citation research source extracting the citation information from the articles in over 10,000 journals from almost every discipline. Web of Science

An abstract and citation database of over 14,000 scientific, technical, medical and social science titles, from 1966 onwards. The citation tracker allows the user to find articles that have cited specific authors vices/resource/database: &f=126 SCOPUS

Keeping up to date Introducing you to ways of keeping up-to-date using electronic tools

alerts, RSS feeds, social media Set up, save and re-run your searches against latest additions to databases Set up profiles to receive automatically the contents pages of journal issues Receive notification of articles recently published and added to a database Keep up to date with breaking news Discover new resources in your field

alerting services Two types –Journal table of contents (TOC) based –Search based: keywords, authors, subject Examples –Zetoc Alert –IEEE Explore/JSTOR/WOS –Library Search

Zetoc Zetoc provides access to the British Libraries Electronic Table of Contents of around 20,000 current journals and around 16,000 conference proceedings published per year

Other updating tools Setting up RSS feeds –Netvibes: –Feedly: Social networking tools –ResearchGate: –Academia.edu: –Twitter:

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Bibliographic management tools

What if the OU Library doesn’t have what I need? Use the document delivery service to order books and photocopies of articles via the British Library Borrow from other libraries using the SCONUL Access scheme: support/libraries-near-youhttp:// support/libraries-near-you Use the ‘suggest new titles’ form titles titles

Help and training resources Training sessions, online or F2F training-sessions training-sessions Subject specialists within the Library Immediate help via Library helpdesk 24/7 Webchat

Image credits All images from Britannica Image QuestBritannica Image Quest Gold panning on the Fraser River, British Columbia, Canada. Universal Images Group The Science Museum, City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia, Spain. Universal Images Group Cosmic microwave telescope, Owens Valley, Calif. David Nunuk/ Science Photo Library Parallel imaging. Sandia National Laboratories Science Photo Library