Effective Searching

Missy HarveyComputer Science Librarianharvey@andrew.cmu.edu

Should We Just Use Google?

Many of us jump immediately onto Google or Google Scholar

We’ll find some helpful hits

But we may have to spend hours weeding through the hits

Google is not exhaustive so we potentially miss a great deal of research

So what’s the alternative?

The Alternative

Target your research

I can help you ensure that you’re finding the majority of what is available on your topic

How?

Let’s begin with the University Libraries website: http://search.library.cmu.edu

Click on Articles & Databases and then click on Databases A-Z

Choosing the Best Tools

The Libraries have hundreds of databases with a significant amount of research not found in Google and Google Scholar

If trying to be exhaustive in your research, then for computer science topics, search:

ACM Digital Library IEEE Xplore INSPEC Web of Science

Why Not Just One Tool?

We should search all four of those databases rather than just one

None of them covers everything that’s published (just like Google)

They have some overlap

But we need to search all of them to ensure we don’t miss any important research

Web of Science Searching

Let’s experiment with Web of Science (WoS) to see how we can target our research

Important: when performing a search in any database, experiment using a variety of synonyms

Sometimes we’re not always quite sure what those synonyms may be

Sample Search

Let’s search on: keystroke dynamics

Sometimes we’re searching on a topic that uses various words to describe it

So to target our research, try to pin down the various words and phrases to use

The next slide is an example hit

I highlighted in red synonyms we should use

Honing Our Search So let’s redo our search using some of those

synonyms

I’ve highlighted how to correctly link the words in our search

Refining Our Search On the left side, WoS provides a wide variety

of ways to refine our results

Under Document Types, we see that the most hits are Articles and Proceedings Papers (from conferences)

But what it we only want a review, we could choose that option

Refining Our Search We see which authors and what sources,

i.e., journals, conferences, and book series have published the most on this topic

These are all ways to refine our search to better target what precisely we need

Additional Tools On the right side of the window, near the bottom are two

important tools to help us find more research References: the bibliography the author listed at the end of

their article Always look at these references because they will lead you to

more hits on this topic Look at the bibliographies in those articles as well This process is called Footnote Chasing Related Records may also help connect you to additional research

Reverse Citations

One of the most powerful tools of WoS is its ability to show us how frequently an article has been cited by others

On the right side we see the quantity of citations, as well as the individual articles titles

We can click on any of them to go directly to those citations

New Visual Tool

WoS is offering a fascinating new tool that is still in beta

It shows us visually a citation map, i.e., a trail of who has cited whom on this topic

You can view citations going forwards and backwards

It’s an extremely powerful tool that we’re just beginning to learn how to use fully

Here’s an example of a 1-generation citation map for an article

Move Onto Other Resources All of what we’ve covered here are tools

available in Web of Science

I encourage you to search the other databases mentioned earlier

You need to ensure you do not miss anything of importance in your research

For Additional Help

Remember that at any time, feel free to contact me for additional help:

Missy Harvey

Computer Science Librarian

Email: harvey@andrew.cmu.edu

Blog: http://cslibrarian.net/

Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~missy/