WISER Social Sciences: Key Search Skills Wednesday 1 November 2006 Judy Reading and Gillian Beattie

Structure of today’s session Presentation outlining useful search strategies Demonstration of a database to show how these strategies might work in practice Time to explore with assistance available

OxLIP Oxford Library Information Platform – our gateway to electronic resources Subject and title index Library catalogues including OLIS Bibliographic databases Full-text electronic journals Internet sites (subject gateways)

Accessing OxLIP Access from any Oxford University computer If access is needed from a non-University PC: Should be arranged before leaving Oxford Register for a personal Athens account If database does not use Athens contact OUCS to arrange remote access to the Oxford University network

Where to start? If you can find a couple of relevant books read those first to get a general idea of a new subject Check your library’s reference section for handbooks which give succinct overviews of research in an area Then spend some time thinking about the topic you are interested in – you may find a mind-map or spider diagram useful at various stages of your literature review as you can track progress of your ideas Make sure you have a system for storing the references you identify – maybe use Refworks or an old-fashioned card index

Books – what are they good for? Books provide a more educational experience than journal articles There is space in a book to provide background and develop ideas Books usually contain older information than journal articles Books can be located in library catalogues – of individual libraries and of consortia. Useful examples include COPAC and Worldcat. See http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/oxlip/index.html Also web services such as Amazon and Google.

Journals... Specific focus, few pages Journals vary – some emphasise research content, others share practitioner experience, others review research Journal indexes not usually connected to specific library collections (although sometimes full-text can be found) Citation indexes allow tracking forward in time as well as backward eg Web of Knowledge Use the Library catalogue to locate journal titles – don’t use article title TD-Net indexes the full-text journal collection in Oxford Contents pages services can keep you updated (TDNet and ZETOC)

Information on the internet Can use services like Google which provide keyword searches – try several as will get different results – look at the advanced search options Can use portals such as the Intute: Social Sciences gateway http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences/ Can identify key organisations and look at their publications and their web-links Important to evaluate information on the internet – Provenance, Currency, Objectivity, Accuracy Could try Internet Detective Tutorial http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/

Locating cutting edge research Find and join mailing lists (see http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk) and use directories to locate active organisations and individuals Ideas may be first expressed in conferences and recorded in conference proceedings (Various sources of information for this – see OCLC Proceedings - also track down the web-sites of key organisations) Original research is reported in dissertations (find listed in library catalogues, Dissertation abstracts (N.America) and Index to Theses (UK)) Research reports are being produced all the time and are often informally published as “grey literature” – these can be found through the internet and by finding out about key organisations and individuals

Reference works Worth investigating your library’s reference section to find: Directories Handbooks and research reviews Statistical information

Tackling an unfamiliar database Check the coverage of a database to see if it includes what you want You can use cross-searching for some collections of databases to identify concentrations of useful references Use the help screens provided – check the specific conventions (eg do they use &, +, or “and”) Use any subject indexes provided Databases now often offer similar functions but you may have to delve a bit to see how they do it compared with one you are familiar with

Keyword & subject searching Keyword searching Searches for terms anywhere in the field or record Useful as a starting place but results can be less relevant Subject indexes Where possible tap into the subject headings or thesauri provided by the databases The library assigns subject headings to all items listed in the online catalogue. This makes it easy to find books on the same or similar topics. You can look up subject headings in a in a five-volume manual called simply Library of Congress Subject Headings ("the big red books").

Combining search terms Boolean logic Boolean connectors : AND, OR, NOT AND to narrow the search OR to broaden the search (synonyms) Symbols for wildcards and truncation ? for a single character wom?n will find woman or women globali?ation will find British and American spelling * for truncation or variant spellings politi* for politic, politics, political, politcally etc.

OR, AND, NOT

Evaluating search results You may need to widen or focus your search depending on what you find How relevant is it to you? May need to find relevance in related work. Evaluate articles to establish how reliable the information contained e.g. is it based on research evidence – what sample size was used etc. Important to evaluate for – Provenance, Currency, Objectivity, Accuracy Peer review process in publishing