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Finding Information for Research: Beyond Google! Nigel Morgan & Jane Sparks November 24 th 2009
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Session outcomes At the end of the session you should be able to: Identify useful information resources for your subject Analyse your topic to produce keywords Techniques for effective searching Use a range of scholarly information sources to find journal articles and book chapters on your subject Use advanced database features including alerts and citation trails
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Which service do you use most often to find information?
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Specialist search tools for scientists RefSeek – http://www.refseek.com/http://www.refseek.com/ 8 useful science search engines: -Scirus www.scirus.com/www.scirus.com/ -Science.gov www.science.govwww.science.gov -ScienceResearch.com www.scienceresearch.com/ www.scienceresearch.com/ -Scitation scitation.aip.org/scitation.aip.org/ -WorldWideScience.org worldwidescience.org/worldwidescience.org/ -Science Accelerator scienceaccelerator.gov/scienceaccelerator.gov/ -TechXtra www.techxtra.ac.ukwww.techxtra.ac.uk
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Planning your search Identify the key concepts in your topic Which words describe these concepts? Identify synonyms Identify alternative spellings Try different combinations of keywords
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Consider synonyms / related terms Environmental impact of global warming on the UK climate Environmental Environment + impacts effects solutions global warming climate change global change climatic change greenhouse effect thermal stress atmospheric composition UK United Kingdom Great Britain + +
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Environmental impact of global warming on UK climate SOLUTIONS waste reduction Kyoto protocol energy saving CONSEQUENCES carbon trading observation empirical data EVIDENCE CAUSES fossil fuels species extinction health threats food scarcity coastal erosion increased land use greenhouse gases
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Exercise 1: Planning your Search
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Accessing resources Links to Voyager / ELS Links to databases Off campus links
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Improving your searches: some basic tricks! AND Global warming AND floods OR Global warming OR climate change (Global warming OR climate change) AND floods Flood* = flood, floods, flooding, flooded globali?ation = globalisation, globalization
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Think of all permutations! Tum o r or Tum ou r Alzheimer or Alzheimer ’s Hospitali s ation or hospitali z ation Ceph alonia or K efalonia Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease or CJD Can you think of any other examples?
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Are you aware of Scopus ? Scopus Nearly 30 million records 250 million quality web sources Broad coverage of sciences Almost 20,000 journals Abstracts go back to 1966 Available via MWEMWE Useful alerts feature
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Exercises 2 & 3 MWE and Scopus
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Research tip: citation searching Q: What is citation searching? A: Looking forward in time to discover articles which have cited a particular work Schreider S.Y. et al. 2000 Climate change impacts on urban flooding. Climatic Change 47 (1-2) pp. 91-115.
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Alerts Information is tailored to your needs. Information is sent directly to your mailbox, or RSS feed reader wherever you are in the worldRSS feed reader Delays in receiving information about the latest publications are minimised. You don’t have to re-run the same old searches every week.
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Exercise 4: Multi-disciplinary databases- advanced features (Citation trails & Alerts)
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Subject Specific Services BIOSIS Previews PubMed ScienceDirect Embase All accessible via MWE
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Finding the full text Schreider, S.Y. et al. 2000 Climate change impacts on urban flooding. Climatic Change 47 (1-2) pp. 91- 115. If you are not given a link via a database check: Voyager Electronic Journals portal
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Exercises 5 & 6: Subject specific databases and finding the full text
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More sources of scholarly information Books – what’s available? COPAC COPAC British Library Integrated Catalogue British Library Integrated Catalogue Library of Congress catalogue (US) Library of Congress catalogue (US) WorldCat WorldCat Theses Index to Theses (UK) Index to Theses (UK) Conference Proceedings Citation Index - via Web of Knowledge via Web of Knowledge
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Exercise 7: Other sources of scholarly information
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Interlibrary Loans Journals & Conferences Pink form Books, Theses, Reports Blue form Authorisation: Lecturer’s signature £6.90 per photocopy / £10.20 per loan Copyright declaration: Your signature
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Keeping up-to-date Latest journal articles on your topic The table of contents of your favourite journal before the printed version arrives
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Exercise 8: Zetoc alerts
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RSS feeds RSS feeds RSS feeds Regular updates of new content added to web sites Alternative to email alerts now offered by many academic-related sites including publishers and databases Need an RSS feed reader – available within the MWE portal
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Mailing lists & blogs Mailing lists Submit messages to list members Receive messages posted to list Search the archives of previous messages Use: www.jiscmail.ac.ukwww.jiscmail.ac.uk Blogs Postings to a web-site in chronological order Vary in quality, but some can be useful Good blogs updated regularly Find blogs via http://blogsearch.google.comhttp://blogsearch.google.com
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And finally… Can you tell us what you have found most useful during the session?
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Further Help Nigel Morgan MorganNJ@Cardiff.ac.uk Jane Sparks SparksJ@Cardiff.ac.uk
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