Choose the Right Literature Research Tools (Or Else…)

Literature research skills are essential for any scientist. An important part of scientific research involves being fully clued up on your research topic and ensuring that you’re not replicating work already done by others. Good literature research skills allow you to quickly identify relevant papers, reports, reviews, books, websites and patents from the ocean of scientific literature. Over several posts I’ll give you some tips on how to improve your literature skills and avoid some of the pitfalls.

I think literature searching involves three major steps; choosing your searching tools, developing search strategies and organising your results.

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Choosing Tools

Three major literature searching tools are library catalogs, the web and bibliographic databases.

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Library catalogs

Most universities now have an OPAC (On-line Public Access Catalog) which you can use to search the libraries collections over the web. These tend to be best for searching out books and printed journals. Modern catalogs can often also give you direct access to electronic books and journals.

It’s hard to give general guidelines for library catalogs as they vary greatly in both their interfaces and searching capabilities. The best advice is to talk to the librarians at your institution and ask for an introduction to using the library catalog. Private companies may also have their own libraries to support research efforts in the organization. Again, talk to your librarian to find out what resources your library can offer you.

One important thing to remember is that library catalogs rarely index the contents of books or journals, they just list the journal or book title. If you’re looking for journal articles you need either a web-search or (better) a bibliographic database.

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The Web

The web is a rich source of information for science, but there is a lot of inaccurate and poor quality information out there too. It is important to evaluate your sources. Things to think about include –

• Who is hosting the information? A respected research organization or University, or is it a commercial company (who may be trying to use data to sell something) or somebody’s own personal web page?
• When was the page updated? Is the information out-of-date?
• Who has written the information? A learned professor or somebody sitting in their bedroom?

You can use certain web-search engines like Google Scholar to search for journals and papers on a topic. Google Scholar is fairly limited in its searching capabilities and you can’t do much to organise your results as you want them. It’s OK for rough searching, but not great for really in-depth literature searching.

A search engine geared specifically towards science is Scirus. Scirus filters scientific websites from the rest of the web and also retrieves information on scientific papers, patents and a number of university research archives.

In addition to this you can try sites like SciTopics which presents summaries of current scientific research written by experts. Helpful if you’re unfamiliar with the area you are researching and need some reliable background information.

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Bibliographic Databases

Bibliographic databases index the scientific literature. This includes journal articles, conference proceedings, patents etc. As such, they are one of the best places to find the latest research papers and reviews on any given topic. Many bibliographic databases allow you to read the abstracts of papers in their collections, access to the full text electronically is usually limited to those journals to which you or your institution subscribe.

Bibliographic databases cover different subject areas and journal titles. Most charge a fee and if you’re at a University it’s almost certain that your library will provide an institutional subscription to several of these databases. Key bibliographic databases for science include SCOPUS, Web of Science and PubMed but there are many others beside these and most subjects will have a selection of more specialized databases.

Some key features of most bibliographic databases are –

• They allow you to set up complicated searches so you can find specific information.
• There are flexible ways to refine and organize your results.
• You can save, print and export your search results in a variety of formats.

When choosing a bibliographic database consider the following –

• Check your access rights to the database and exactly what content you’ll be able to search.
• Check the database covers the right subject areas, journals and periods that you are attempting to research.
• Get familiar with how to search the database correctly, this will make a significant difference to the quality of your results and will prevent you missing relevant material or getting swamped by too many hits.

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Summary

In this post you’ve seen some of the different resources available for carrying out scientific literature searching. In the next post, ways to construct searches in bibliographic databases will be considered.

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I’m currently the Assistant Subject Librarian for Biochemistry at the Radcliffe Science Library, Oxford University. My job is to provide library support services to staff and students in the Biochemistry Department at Oxford University. Most of the information presented in these blog posts is based on materials I have used to help train students at the University in literature searching skills and upon my own personal experience as a researcher in microbial genetics. To find out more about me and my activities, please visit my blog and follow me on Twitter.

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After selecting your tools, check out how to maximize their use:

3 Steps to Mastering Literature Searches

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