Generic Skills Workshop

1. Generic Skills Workshop Advanced Library Skills Sue Godsell

2. Tonight’s session • Literature searching • Getting the words right • Using the right tools • Search techniques • Keeping up to date • Using other libraries • Managing your references

3. Getting the words right Why? • The results you will get are only as good as the search you enter How? • Determine and analyse the individual concepts in your proposal and consider how they are inter-related • Using a search analysis sheet/mind mapping tool (e.g. Inspiration) can help

4. Example of a mind map for a literature search

5. Getting the words right continued • List your key words/phrases and then consider… • Variant spellings • American English e.g. behaviour/behavior, organisation/organization • Plurals e.g. child/children • Prefixes and hyphens e.g. self-esteem • Alternative terms • e.g. climate change/global warming • Wider / narrower concepts • e.g. cancer <–> blood cancer <–> lymphoblastic leukaemia • You may be able to use a thesaurus e.g. PsycInfo, MeSH

6. Using the right tools • The Library subscribes to 90+databases to help you identify what has been published in your field • Which ones are best for your research? See the subject guide(s) or ask your subject librarian • Check the scope and coverage • Become familiar with the interface(s) • Same search principles and techniques apply to different interfaces

7. Some search techniques • Phrase searching: put exact phrases in quotation marks e.g. “quantitative easing” • Truncation or stemming: asterisk after the word stem e.g. geneti* • Wildcards: used for variant spellings e.g. organi?ation, labo$r

8. More search techniques • Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT • Brackets: e.g. (cold* or flu or influenza) and (“vitamin c” or “ascorbic acid”) • Proximity searching: specify how close keywords are to each other, e.g. business* n2 ethic*, global* same warm*

9. Boolean Logic AND OR Ascorbic Acid Los Angeles Vitamin C Architecture NOT Java Indonesia

10. More search techniques • “Pearl growing” - a way of expanding your search if you have found/been told about one or more important paper(s) in your field • Use the words and phrases found in the title/abstract/keywords and search on these • Search for more articles by the same author • Use any “related records” feature that the database has • Look at the bibliography of that paper • Carry out a citation search

11. More search techniques Citation Searching • Useful once you have identified one or more important papers in your field • Allows you to find papers that have cited a paper you know about • Good way of searching forward in time, from an older paper to more recent ones

12. Keeping up to date • Save your search(es) and set up alerts to get new additions by email • Set up citation alerts to find out which new papers cite an important paper in your field • Register at journal web sites/Citation Indexes/ZETOC to get the latest tables of contents of the most useful journals emailed to you

13. Using other Libraries Find out which other libraries you can use: • University of London libraries • Senate House Library • British Library • SCONUL Access Scheme allows research students to borrow • See the subject guide/ask your subject librarian about other libraries • Interlibrary loan service

14. Managing your references • Use a bibliographic management package such as EndNote, Zotero or Mendeley • These will help you store and search the references you have collected • EndNote and others also work with Word to help you with citing your references when writing up

15. Any questions? Improving your Search Skills