Finding Academic Literature Rowena Stewart Liaison Librarian rowena.stewarted.ac.uk Tel: [phone]

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Finding Academic LiteratureRowena
StewartLiaison Librarianrowena.stewart_at_ed.ac.uk
Tel [phone]
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To cover
Finding Academic Literature

• Knowing what youre looking for
• Bibliographic databases
• Getting more from a good reference
• Reading the full-text
• Citing references using EndNote
• Ill just Google it

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Thinking about the information you need
Finding Academic Literature

• Think about the question you want to answer and
  identify its major subjects
• brainstorm for words and phrases associated with
  the major subjects.
• Also think of
• synonyms and alternative spellings.
• formal and informal terms (myocardial infarction
  and heart attack)
• The words and phrases you come up with will
  become search terms

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Finding Academic Literature
What type of information do you want?

• Academic, Popular
• Summary
• Policy

• PICO model
• Patient Population or Problem
• Intervention
• Comparison
• Outcome

What would make an article more/less useful?
Limits on what you have to read.
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Finding Academic Literature
To summarise

• Identify your major subject terms
• Think/Note synonyms, broader, related and
  narrower concepts for these.
• Think of any limits or focus (PICO) on the
  information you want

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Brainstorming Aids
Finding Academic Literature
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Library Catalogue and E-Journals pages cf
Bibliographic databases
Finding Academic Literature

• Library catalogue and e-journal pages tell you
  what journals we have,
• eg Nursing Standard
• Not who has published what in those journals,
• ie not that Oakey Slade published the article
  Physiological observation track and trigger
  system in Nursing Standard in 2006.

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Bibliographic databases help you find what has
already been published in your field of research.

Finding Academic Literature

• Because they
• Contain information about the contents of a range
  of publications (abstracts, journal articles,
  book chapters, reports and standards)
• Are usually subject specific
• Search details of millions of articles to find
  what publications exist about a topic - even if
  not held in our library
• Perform sophisticated searches limited to topics,
  date, authors or type of publication
• N.B.
• Bibliographic databases provide
  references/citations for material and often
  abstracts or summaries as well but only link out
  to full-text

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Bibliographic Databases Common Features
Finding Academic Literature

• Simple and Advanced search screens
• Subject headings/controlled vocabulary
• Indexes or thesauri
• Links to full-text
• Links to library catalogue/ejournal pages
• Combining searches using Boolean terms
• Saving/Emailing/Exporting records
• Alerts

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Boolean logic for combining search terms
Finding Academic Literature

• All foods with raspberries All flavours of
  ice cream
• Raspberry ice cream

Ice cream AND raspberries
Ice cream NOT raspberries
raspberries OR ice cream
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But what do you get from a bibliographic
database?
Finding Academic Literature
Citation information a reference to an article
etc
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Finding Academic Literature
references
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Finding Academic Literature
http//www.lib.ed.ac.uk
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Searching bibliographic databases
Finding Academic Literature

• Be specific when you start to search for academic
  papers but, if you are not finding anything to
  read use broader words and phrases from your
  brainstorming exercises.
• ?see what you get and use further search terms
  from your results
• ?read the appropriate references in useful papers
  
• find articles which have, in their reference
  list, a paper youve found useful.

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Stuff off the web
Finding Academic Literature

• Using Google or other search engines to find
  material on the web is fine as long as you assess
  what you get.
• Bibliographic databases let you avoid that step
  because they provide access to academically or
  professionally approved material.
• ? you just have to decide if what youve found
  is relevant.

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Evaluating web pages
Finding Academic Literature

• Before you take information from a website found
  by a web search engine (eg Google), assess it and
  its site to decide if both are trustworthy and of
  a sufficiently high standard for your needs.
• Currency
• Relevancy
• Accuracy
• Authority
• Objectivity
• More information at Researching an assignment -
  useful skills and sources of information (Step 4)
  http//www.lib.ed.ac.uk/howto/infoskills6.shtml