1. How the Library can support your project or dissertation
UWE Library Services
How the Library can support your project or dissertation
Alastair Sleat
EDM Librarian

2. Outcomes of the session
To maximise the effectiveness of your search strategy
To become familiar with some key information resources
To see how the Library can help you with referencing

3. Before you start Do you know what you want?
Will other people understand the terms you are using?
Are there alternative terms meaning the same thing?
What are the broader/narrower concepts?
Help through Study Skills

4. Remember that using Google will find only about 30% of the resources available to you as students.

5. Library Search Searches all our resources (well most) subscribe to
Access through Library home page
You will also need to use Your Subject

6. So we’ve had a go at some searching on Library Search, but as we said at the beginning, Library Search doesn’t search for absolutely everything that we own or subscribe to, so if you want to be more comprehensive in your search or if you don’t find quite what you want, you may need to search further.
We subscribe to a number of subject databases and they often have the advantage of:
Narrowing your search to a particular topic (where Library Search and Google cover every discipline).
They may contain full text of items that you cannot get through Google or Library Search.
They will also contain references to things that we might not own or have access to, but which you can obtain through other methods. We’ll come back to that at the end of the session.

7. Sources of Information
Books (incl. e books) and specialist encyclopaedias
Journals (incl. e journals)
Conference proceedings
Standards
Patents
Technical reports

8. The trouble with books Long gap between idea and publication
Not indexed
Catalogues usually give only a description of the book – contents are hidden
Most things not written in books at all

9. The world of journals Speedier publication of research
Articles have bibliographies and references to other works
Academic, professional or popular?
Peer review – sometimes
90% are electronic

10. Collections strong on Mathematics
Cambridge Journals Online
Science Direct
Library Search works with both these – more functionality from the database itself

12. Compendex The Engineering Index
We call it a bibliographic database or just a database
Indexes articles and conference papers
Good way to start research but you won’t necessarily get articles in full text

14. IEEE XPlore
Access to 1/3 of the world’s literature in electrical engineering, communications and computer science
Full text access to IEEE and IET journals and conferences, standards and ebooks
Aerospace, automotive, robotics, sensors etc etc.

16. Society of Automotive Engineers Digital Library
Provides access to the technical papers of the Society of Automotive Engineers
In full text from 1998 onwards
Also includes abstracts of other SAE papers
Automotive and Aerospace coverage

18. Knovel
Knovel contains over 3000 electronic books, as well as interactive graphs and equations which allow users to accurately plot points, test ranges for 'what-if' scenarios and solve real-world problems from tables and charts in references that would otherwise be static images on the page

19. Knovel data search

20. In addition to Complete British Standards online
Big e journal packages such as Science Direct and Business Source Premier (strong on Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research)
Engineer it – access to trade catalogues
ArXiv - Open e-print archive with over articles in physics, in mathematics

21. If we haven’t got what you want
We can try and obtain it for you
Books, articles, conference papers and theses from the British Library
Standards (i.e. those not featured on BSOL)
Other papers/data sometimes harder to obtain
Contact us

22. Referencing and citing
CITING: acknowledging within your text the document from which you have obtained your information.
REFERENCE: the detailed description of the document from which you have obtained your information.

23. Why reference?
Each time you use someone else’s ideas or words it is essential that you acknowledge this in your work.
Not acknowledging other people's work is not only intellectually dishonest but also illegal.

24. More about plagiarism

25. Extensive referencing help is available from the Library Home Page

26. RefWorks allows you to:
Create your own searchable database of references.
You can then incorporate the references from your database into a word document and automatically format the document and bibliography.
RefWorks is available from the eLibrary, under the ‘Find a database’ tab.

27. Where to find help Study Skills Library help desk
“Ask a Librarian” , phone or chat.You can arrange an appointment with me through this
Library workshops