Key Search Skills for Searching the Scientific Literature

1. Key Search Skills for Searching the Scientific Literature Gabriella Netting Penny Roberts 31 October, 2007

2. What will we cover? • Reasons for conducting a literature search • Organisation of scientific literature • Search strategies • Evaluation • Citation searching • Demonstration of a database search

3. Some reasons for searching: • Specific information • Research needs • Current Awareness

4. Organisation of scientific literature: • Primary literature • These are the first published results of an original investigation reported by an individual or a research group. E.g. conference papers, research articles, dissertations, etc. • Peer review process • Intended audience: researchers within the same field • Specialised vocabulary • No financial rewards for the publication

5. Basic structure of primary literature: • Abstract or introduction • Methodology • Results and discussion • Conclusion • References • Examples: Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, American Journal of Surgery, etc.

6. Organisation of the scientific literature cont. • Secondary literature • This is information about primary sources in a condensed format. E.g. encyclopedias, textbooks, review articles • Intended for wider audience • Not peer reviewed • Written by journalists • Publications contain advertisements • Examples: Nature, Science, Scientific American etc.

7. How do we access scientific literature? • Papers are recorded by indexing/abstracting services • The records are electronically searchable • Results contain all necessary information to find the paper • Some results will link to electronic full text but not all of them!

8. Search skills • Finding the best search terms • Combining terms • Finding appropriate information sources to search • Selecting, evaluating and saving results • Retrieving full document

9. http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/oxlip

10. Journal article databases • Used to find papers, book chapters and book reviews (N.B. references only, NOT necessarily full text) • They could cover a specific subject or many subjects • Are not necessarily tied to library holdings • They look different but have similar functionality

11. A couple of definitions • Library Catalogue = a list of books, journals, maps, records, etc. held in the library (Use this to search for a book or journal, once you know the title of the journal or the author or title of a book) • Bibliographic (journal article) Database = a systematic compilation of citations of journal articles (Use these to search for content, e.g. book chapters and journal articles)

12. How to create a search strategy? • Ask a clear search question e.g. What are the popular ways of losing weight? • Break the question into search concepts e.g. popular, ways, losing, weight • Select a range of related search terms popular: common, favourite etc. ways: methods, techniques etc. losing: lose, reduction, reducing etc. weight: fat, diet etc. • Combine terms into a search strategy by using Boolean operators

13. Combine terms using Boolean connectors: AND, OR, NOT • AND to narrow the search • OR to broaden the search (use this to combine synonyms, or related terms) • NOT excludes search terms

14. AND, OR, NOT

15. Other search tricks • Symbols for wildcards and truncation • ? for a single character within the word • wom?n for woman or women • * for truncation or variant spellings • enzym* for enzyme, enzymes, enzymology etc • “use this” for searching for phrases e.g. “creation theory”

16. Final search string: Topic: Popular ways of losing weight Search string could be: (popular OR common OR favo?rite) AND (way* OR method* OR technique*) AND (los* OR reduc*) AND (weight or fat or diet*) DO NOT TRY THIS!

17. Instead: Do separate searches: • popular OR common OR favo?rite • way* OR method* OR technique* • los* OR reduc* • weight or fat or diet* Then combine searches: • #1 AND #2 AND #3 AND #4

18. Evaluate your results: • By relevance • By the source material • By citations • For web resources: URL, currency, layout, working links, etc.

19. Getting your hands on the full-text Is there a link from the database? • Click on it to access the full-text if available • Check OU e-Journals http://sfx7.exlibrisgroup.com/oxford/az

20. Getting hold of the full text (cont.) • Is it available in print in an Oxford library? • Check OLIS • http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/olis/ • If not, request the document from a document provider through your library

21. Other search strategies… Thesaurus searching • These are predetermined subject terms from which to choose • Yield more accurate results • Provide definition of terms • Some databases search subject terms automatically, eg. Medline

22. Other search strategies…Citation Searching • Doing a search on just one citation allows creating a bibliography of both old and new research on your topic • To work back in time: use the bibliography at the end of the paper • To work forward in time: use a citation index to see how many papers referred to the original paper subsequently, eg. Science Citation Index, Scopus etc.

23. Here to help • Queries about e-journals and databases, including access problems eresources@ouls.ox.ac.uk • Radcliffe Science Library enquiries.rsl@ouls.ox.ac.uk • http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/rsl/

24. Or contact your Subject Librarian • Bio- & environmental sciences: roger.mills@ouls.ox.ac.uk • Life sciences & medicine: juliet.ralph@ouls.ox.ac.uk • Physical sciences: ljilja.ristic@ouls.ox.ac.uk • Health Care Libraries: linda.atkinson@hcl.ox.ac.uk • Complete list at • www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/collections/librarians

25. We welcome feedback • You will get an e-mail with the online evaluation form in due course. • Next WISER Science session: Keeping up to date with the literature. Wednesday, 7 November

26. Demonstration • Question: Is there a link between lack of sleep and performance among university students? • Search string: (sleep depriv* OR insomnia*) AND performance AND (college student* OR university student*)