How to do an effective literature search basic user

How to do an Effective Literature Search?Stop Searching, Start Discovering... The scenarios• “I just join as new graduate students and I am not sure how to do a literature search” • “I

How to do an Effective Literature Search?

Stop Searching, Start Discovering

The scenarios

• “I just join as new graduate students and I am not

sure how to do a literature search”

• “I have been into research for sometimes now but I spend a lot of time to get the articles I want”

• “I wanted to start a new research work, how can I

get the right literature in the shortest possible

time?”

  If you experience similar concerns, this module

may help you to do an effective literature search

How to start?

• There are many ways to begin literature search,

generally we have:

– Keywords (most commonly use)

– Begin from a paper given by your mentor

– References from a given paper

– Journals in your interest of subject areas

– Authors, if you know some …

• As a beginner, we will only talk about keyword

search in topics or titles

Let’s start …

• For example, we want to do a search in “Japanese

encephalitis”, a virus transmitted from mosquitoes and very prevalent in Southeast Asia and the Far East

• But … you did not know how to spell “encephalitis”

What can we do?

Use Wildcards!

Here is how wildcard works …

•Under Topic Search, just type in “ Japanese ence* ” and hit button search

•The search will return all combinations of words begin with “ence”

•Other wildcards include: ? (if it is only one character) $ (if it is 0 to one character)

Use wildcard to help you!

Put an “ * ” after the word to retrieve all combinations of words from 0 to infinity characters

Take note * will get what you want and those you don’t want …

Immediately you identify the word

“encephalitis” from your search results!

Note that ence*

will also get you:

•Encephalitis

•Encephalic

•Encephala

•Enceinte

•… etc

Be selective!

Now just want to retrieve the right results?

• “Japanese Encephalitis” is a type of disease, which

used to call “Japanese B Encephalitis”

• Use inverted commas to get the exact words

Use inverted commas “ … ” to get the exact terms

Use Search History to combine your search results

The total records found

Narrow down your search: use Refine Results

Select the subjects you are interested and narrow your

search results

Refine further to get what you want

Refine further to retrieve only review articles and now you left 46 articles

to read and select

Note: you can repeat this refine process in different orders and combinations to get result sets you want!

Which one to read first? Why not go for highly cited articles first …

Sort your result sets using Times Cited and get those highly cited articles appear

on first page

Note: You can also

sort by author if that

helps you to retrieve

faster (Be aware that

selection of articles is

necessary, never

expect one search to

get all relevant results

… The good news is

you have only 46 to

scan instead of 2720)

Got what you want? Drill down to read more

Get the full text if your library subscribes to the journal Get information directly from NCBI also

Running out of keywords? Try

KeyWords Plus, you may find

more relevant keywords

suggested by references’

authors

Don’t stop here … explore from here

Interesting! Ever think of why this article has been cited so many times? What papers are these?

Find out more … click from here

Looking for articles sharing the same references? Explore from

here!

Don’t forget: References

is another great source to explore relevant articles

Follow up? It’s easy … right from here

Want to follow up? Create an Citation Alert and get email whenever this article gets new

citation

Why not checking the Impact Factor of the journal or maybe other relevant contents?

Don’t forget: You also have Citation

Map to help you!

You will be surprised to find out that an article in Virology

has applications in:

• Immunology

• Infectious Diseases

• Microbiology

• Neurosciences

• Pediatrics … etc

Ten different new application fields!

  Use Citation Map today … you new

way to discover hidden applications!

Get organize … start from beginning

Save selected records

into EndNote or EndNote

Web Remember:

Manage of references

takes time, so start

managing them now

Do you know? EndNote

Web comes free for

Web of Science and EndNote users!

Last note to take …

• Effective literature search really depends on many

factors, some of which are:

– How much you have known a subject

– Your research experience

– Guidance from mentors

– Your library resources … access to the right literature, etc

And … vary from discipline to discipline

Always remember …

• Literature search is an iterative process

• You must do it from time to time throughout your

course of research

• Selective contents and tools in Web of Science

(WOS) get you the right literature, not overload you

with irrelevant literature – Effective search

• In simple terms … If you can get relevant literature

effectively within 3 months using WOS, why bother

to spend one year or even longer just to do similar

search without WOS?

• You have a choice …

Stop Searching, Start Discovering

Need help? Contact us

Features presented here are basic, if you want to learn

advance features in WOS … write to us

ts.training.asia@thomson.com

For technical help, please direct to

ANZ ts.support.anz@thomsonreuters.com

Rest of APAC (including

SEA, HK, Taiwan, India) ts.support.asia@thomsonreuters.com

Stop Searching, Start Discovering

Thank You!

Contact Information

To view additional recorded training, please visit our website

http://science.thomsonreuters.com/training/

Stop Searching, Start Discovering