Conferences

James Shaw and Sue Bird

WISER Finding Stuff

Conferences allow you to:

Finding conferences

Tools for gathering information

E-MAIL ALERTS

General Websites:

Societies and Organizations

Web 2.0 tools for monitoring conferences

Finding conferences

Finding Published Output

Finding proceedings•Often difficult because of variety of ways of publishing•May be no Proceedings, but selected papers published separately

•No comprehensive listing•Check:

• Library catalogues• Organisation’s websites• Conference databases• Subject databases• People who went

Locating conference papers• If you are given a reference to a conference paper that doesn’t

mean it was necessarily published!• Recent papers might be on web – try searching on the paper

title, author, organisation name or the conference name• Sometimes you can quite easily track down the author and they

will send you a copy• If published conference papers are not available in Oxford the Library Services can usually get hold of it for you through inter-library loan

Searching library holdings in Oxford University

• When searching SOLO for a conference paper you need to search for the proceedings of the conference rather than the specific paper

• Conferences are treated as corporate authors• Published proceedings may have different title to the

original • Publisher may be different from conference organiser

SOLO• SOLO has no option to limit by document type so you

need to use keyword search and include ‘proceedings’ ‘conference’, ‘symposium’ etc as keywords alongside subject terms

• Most conferences in the collections will have a Subject Heading which includes ‘Congresses’

• So best search for keyword(s) in titles and subjects, and for Congresses in LC Subjects, e.g:

Other Library catalogues

•See OXLIP+ under Library Catalogues

•Especially useful for UK is COPAC or British Library Catalogue

•You can ask for Inter-library loan of identified conferences

Conferences at the British Library

• The British Library catalogue can be limited to just conferences

• The ZETOC service – http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ provides access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents.

This database contains details of approximately 20,000 current journals and 16,000 conference proceedings published per year.

• Almost 15 million article and conference records• Use the ZETOC Alerting service (via O.S.S.)

British Library•The British Library integrated catalogue

includes over 400,000 conference proceedings on a variety of subjects

• Go to the British Library integrated catalogue home page • Choose "Search the integrated catalogue" • Click “Catalogue subset search” from the top bar • Then choose “Document Supply Conferences” from the list.

Google & Google Scholar•Use Google for locating announcements of forthcoming conferences

•No controlled vocabulary, so search for ‘conference’ and also synonyms – meeting, symposium, congress etc

•Prefer Google Scholar for conference papers

Conference Paper Indexes•CPCI – Conference Proceedings Citation Index – now incorporated into Web of Science

•COS Conference Papers Index – available through ProQuest

•PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst – available through OCLC FirstSearch

• Find all these via OxLIP+

Conference Proceedings Citation Index

CPCI covers only publications in which the proceedings are published for the first time, and only those which contain complete papers, not just abstracts.

• Coverage includes international proceedings, and is not limited to those in the English language, (currently 110,000+ proceedings).

• Published proceedings may be included from a number of sources; books or series produced by publishers or societies, reports, sets of preprints (when preprints are the only publications from a conference) or journals.

• More than 12,000 conferences added annually – some 5.2 million papers in total.

Conference Papers Index (ProQuest)

This database provides citations to papers and poster sessions presented at major scientific meetings.

• Information is derived from final programs, abstracts booklets

and published proceedings, as well as from questionnaire responses.

• Records include complete ordering information to obtain preprints, abstracts,

proceedings and other publications derived from the conference, plus title & author information needed to track the specific papers.

• Available through OxLIP+

PapersFirst• OCLC index of papers presented at conferences worldwide• Covers every published congress, symposium, conference, exposition,

workshop and meeting received by The British Library Document Supply Centre.

• Database details • SubjectsThe wide variety of subjects discussed at the covered meetings.• Sources Included in each record.• Number of records: Over 6,500,000• Dates covered: 1993 to present• Updated: Semimonthly (twice a month)• Available through OXLIP+ (search title index or under general bibliographic tools)

Proceedings First [OCLC]

• Covers every published congress, symposium, conference, exposition, workshop and meeting received by The British Library Document Supply Centre.

• Contains in each record a list of the papers presented at each conference. • Subjects: conference proceedings, meetings, congresses, symposia,

exhibitions, workshops• Sources Included in each record.• Number of records: 192,000+• Dates covered: 1993 to present• Updated: Semiweekly (twice a week)• Available through OXLIP+• and search title index or under general bibliographic tools

Subject databasesMost subject-specific bibliographic databases include conference papers and proceedings

Find those relevant to your subject via OxLIP+Some databases will allow you to limit by conference as document type eg:

SCOPUS ; Historical AbstractsOpenSIGLE : System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe PAIS International (Public Affairs, Development, etc.) (via ProQuest)

Repositories• Institutional and subject-based repositories being

developed Oxford: Oxford Research Archive http://ora.ox.ac.uk/

Search them via: OAIster http://www.oaister.org (or via OxLIP+) Google / Google Scholar SCIRUS http://www.scirus.com (or via OXLIP+)

Newspapers• Often report on major conferences, usually while

being held• Frequently do not give any indication of where

proceedings / website can be found• Search newspapers through Nexis UK, available on

OxLIP+• Totally international with worldwide coverage – not just UK

Quoting• Be consistent and follow a standard system, e..g.

Harvard, when referring to papers or proceedings.• Give as much detail as possible – remember how much

trouble you had finding it! An accurate reference will help others.

• Generally include:• Author(s) of paper - surname and initials Year of publication, 'Title of

paper - in single quotation marks' [in] Editor (if applicable), Title of published proceeding which may include place held and date(s) - italicised, Publisher, Place of publication, Page numbers.

To summarise• Identify relevant organisations and mailing lists for information on

upcoming conferences• Many papers are available online • Use Inter-library loan service for printed items not held locally• There are specific databases for conference proceedings • Many general or subject indexing databases allow you to search

for conference proceedings• Your subject librarian is always ready to help - see

http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/librarians

WISER Archive•This and most of the other presentations in the WISER programme are available on the Bodleian Libraries site:

http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/services/training/wiser