1. Generic Skills Workshop
Advanced Library Skills Sue Godsell

2. Tonight’s session Literature searching Keeping up to date
Getting the words right
Using the right tools
Search techniques
Keeping up to date
Using other libraries
Managing your references

3. Getting the words right
Why?
The results you will get are only as good as the search you enter
How?
Determine and analyse the individual concepts in your proposal and consider how they are inter-related
Using a search analysis sheet/mind mapping tool (e.g. Inspiration) can help

4. Example of a mind map for a literature search

5. Getting the words right continued
List your key words/phrases and then consider…
Variant spellings
American English e.g. behaviour/behavior, organisation/organization
Plurals e.g. child/children
Prefixes and hyphens e.g. self-esteem
Alternative terms
e.g. climate change/global warming
Wider / narrower concepts
e.g. cancer <–> blood cancer <–> lymphoblastic leukaemia
You may be able to use a thesaurus e.g. PsycInfo, MeSH

6. Using the right tools
The Library subscribes to 90+databases to help you identify what has been published in your field
Which ones are best for your research? See the subject guide(s) or ask your subject librarian
Check the scope and coverage
Become familiar with the interface(s)
Same search principles and techniques apply to different interfaces

7. Some search techniques
Phrase searching: put exact phrases in quotation marks e.g. “quantitative easing”
Truncation or stemming: asterisk after the word stem e.g. geneti*
Wildcards: used for variant spellings e.g. organi?ation, labo$r

8. More search techniques
Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT
Brackets: e.g. (cold* or flu or influenza) and (“vitamin c” or “ascorbic acid”)
Proximity searching: specify how close keywords are to each other, e.g. business* n2 ethic*, global* same warm*

9. Boolean Logic Java AND OR NOT Ascorbic Acid Vitamin C Indonesia
Los Angeles
Ascorbic Acid
Architecture
Vitamin C
NOT
Java
Indonesia

10. More search techniques
“Pearl growing” - a way of expanding your search if you have found/been told about one or more important paper(s) in your field
Use the words and phrases found in the title/abstract/keywords and search on these
Search for more articles by the same author
Use any “related records” feature that the database has
Look at the bibliography of that paper
Carry out a citation search

11. More search techniques
Citation Searching
Useful once you have identified one or more important papers in your field
Allows you to find papers that have cited a paper you know about
Good way of searching forward in time, from an older paper to more recent ones

12. Keeping up to date
Save your search(es) and set up alerts to get new additions by
Set up citation alerts to find out which new papers cite an important paper in your field
Register at journal web sites/Citation Indexes/ZETOC to get the latest tables of contents of the most useful journals ed to you

13. Using other Libraries Find out which other libraries you can use:
University of London libraries
Senate House Library
British Library
SCONUL Access Scheme allows research students to borrow
See the subject guide/ask your subject librarian about other libraries
Interlibrary loan service

14. Managing your references
Use a bibliographic management package such as EndNote, Zotero or Mendeley
These will help you store and search the references you have collected
EndNote and others also work with Word to help you with citing your references when writing up

15. Improving your Search Skills
Any questions?