Literature searchingFor final year chemistry undergraduates

Isobel Stark12th October 2011

Today’s session• Introduction to text-based literature searching

• Finding the full-text

• Managing your references

Literature searching

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3 important questions• What information do you need?

• Where do you look for it?

• How can you get hold of it?

Research information needs to be..

• High quality – peer reviewed

• Up to date

• Relevant

Types of research information• Journal papers

• Conference papers

• Books

• Theses

• Standards & patents

• Reports

• Grey literature

Where to find it• Gateways & search engines

• Pre-print & e-print servers

• Publishers websites e.g. Science Direct

• Learned Societies

• Journal databases and indexes

Gateways & search engines

There are some good search engines –useful for finding free information

• Google Scholar (general academic)

• Scirus (scientific information)

• ArXiv

Gateways & search engines

• Gateways such as Intute (Chemistry) select and evaluate websites for you.

• There are many high quality websites but you still need to evaluate what you find.

Pre-prints & e-prints• the information is free and usually full text

• they contain the very latest research and ideas

• there is no delay in publication

• institutional repositories may contain data and other information too

• Varying quality: ‘pre-prints’, departmental publications

• Search many at once through OAIster or Google

• High quality information

• Link to full text if we have a subscription

• Alerting services often available

BUT

• Limited range of source material

• Less sophisticated search facilities than major databases

Publishers websites

Learned societies• Like commercial publishers, learned societies

websites restrict you to a single publisher

• targeted; limited but likely to be very high quality

• Can have other useful information elsewhere on the website

Journal databases• These list research published in academic journals,

conferences, etc.

• The university pays for a number of subscription-only databases which allow you to search for this material

• For the key ones relevant to you see your subject pagehttp://www.soton.ac.uk/library/subjects/chemistry/databases.html

Why journal databases?

Because they

• link to up to date information from peer reviewed publications

• are usually well indexed enabling you to search in detail

• contain abstracts summarising the articles retrieved

• often link directly to the full text if it is available electronically

Which database?

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Journal databases

For the key ones relevant to you see your subject pagehttp://www.soton.ac.uk/library/subjects/chemistry/databases.html

Rexays• https://www.reaxys.com/

• Reaxys is a web-based system for searching Crossfire Beilstein, Crossfire Gmelin and the Patents databases.

• It covers an extensive collection of organic, organo-metallic, and inorganic chemistry data

• Search by structure, substructure, reaction, text, and property data.

• Online training and support available:http://www.reaxys.com/info/training-center

WoS - Citation searching• Looks to see who has cited (referenced) whom

• Only available on certain databases (e.g. Web of Knowledge)

Access• Institutional login

– Southampton Username and password

• VPN

– check iSolutions site for details– as if ‘on campus’

Search techniques

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Anatomy of a literature search

Create a search strategy

Identify resources that cover your study topic

Conduct a search using search operators (i.e. AND, OR and NOT)

Check results for relevance

Changes to search strategy needed?From library resources, obtain the items to read

Searching techniques• Boolean And, Or, Not

• Truncation

• Wildcards

• Phrase searching

Boolean Logic

a AND b

a OR b

a NOT ba a a

b b b

Can be used to join different search terms

Boolean Or• Use to combine synonyms/alternative terms,

e.g.

Greenhouse effect OR global warming

Boolean And• Use to combine different concepts, e.g.

Greenhouse effect AND methane

Boolean searching• Force order of search using brackets e.g.

(Greenhouse effect OR global warming) AND methane

Truncation

• Finds words with a common stem (normally * symbol, $ in webcat / medline)

• environ* will find

– environs– environment– environments– environmental – environmentalist etc etc

Wildcards

• Replace one or two characters (normally ? symbol)

– Ethan?l will find both Ethanol and Ethanal– Chemist? will find both Chemist and Chemists

but not chemistry– Alumin?um will find both aluminium and

aluminum

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Phrase searching• Search in quotes to force a phrase search

• Some databases default to phrase searching, some to Boolean AND.

• Truncation usually doesn’t work

• “greenhouse effect” will only find records with that phrase and not records with ‘the effects of greenhouse gases’

Controlled vocabulary (thesaurus)• Only available in certain databases (Medline,

Inspec, Beilstein, Scifinder)

• Terms added to records from a centrally maintained list – subject index

Controlled vocabulary (thesaurus)• Terms added to a record by Indexers

– Taken from a fixed list (thesaurus)

• Searching these makes results more relevant by

– Avoiding concepts mentioned in passing– Retrieving material containing alternative terms

Chemical Searching in Inspec• How do you differentiate between Co and CO when

the database is case insensitive?

• Element where there is a single component

• Binary where there are to components

• System where there are more than two components

Chemical Searching in Inspec• In additional there are four roles indicating the

function of the chemical component. These roles are:

– Dopant– Interface system– Surface or substrate– Adsorbate or sorbate

Chemical Searching in Inspec• Inspec Classification

Split into 5 sections. Section A: physics and section B: electrical and Electronics probably of most use to Chemists

– e.g. A7155G Impurity and defect levels in II-VI and III-V semiconductors

Finding the full text

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Finding the documents

• Direct links from databases

• TDNet – electronic (and some print) journal holdings – links from Library web page and from most databases

• WebCat – print and electronic holdings of books, journals, conferences and reports

Finding the full-text• Rexays – DOI links

• WoS/Inspec – TDNet button

Managing your results

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Search results – what next?• Mark, Export, Record

– Mark relevant references– Export: email/reference software to manage

your results– Record: how you found it

Recording• Academic integrity

• Referencing styles

– ACS– Harvard

• Plagiarism

Endnote Web• Register for it on the Web of Knowledge website

• Endnote Web Quick Reference Guidehttp://www.endnote.com/support/helpdocs/EndNoteWebQRC.pdf

• Endnote Web Training and supporthttp://www.soton.ac.uk/library/infoskills/bibliographic/endnoteweb/endnotewebtraining.html

Organising your documents• Decide on a filing system and stick to it!

• For example:

– First Author/year– Add numbers or letters at end if more than one

paper per year

• Note the filename and or physical folder in Endnote/bibliographic software

Further help

• Contact your Academic Liaison Librarian

• www.southampton.ac.uk/library/subjects/chemistry