1. Finding Information for Research: Beyond Google! Nigel Morgan & Jane Sparks November 24 th 2009

3. 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

4. Which service do you use most often to find information?

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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 + +

8. 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

10.  Exercise 1: Planning your Search

11. Accessing resources  Links to Voyager / ELS  Links to databases  Off campus links

12. 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

13. 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?

14. 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

15.  Exercises 2 & 3 MWE and Scopus

16. 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.

17. 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.

18.  Exercise 4: Multi-disciplinary databases- advanced features (Citation trails & Alerts)

19. Subject Specific Services BIOSIS Previews PubMed ScienceDirect Embase All accessible via MWE

20. 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

21.  Exercises 5 & 6: Subject specific databases and finding the full text

22. 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

23.  Exercise 7: Other sources of scholarly information

24. 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

25. Keeping up-to-date  Latest journal articles on your topic  The table of contents of your favourite journal before the printed version arrives

26.  Exercise 8: Zetoc alerts

27. 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

28. 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

29. And finally… Can you tell us what you have found most useful during the session?

30. Further Help Nigel Morgan MorganNJ@Cardiff.ac.uk Jane Sparks SparksJ@Cardiff.ac.uk