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How to do an Effective Literature Search?Application Training Module Series Iby Customer Education Team
Stop Searching, Start Discovering
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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
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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
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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!
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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
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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!
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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
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Use Search History to combine your search results
The total records found
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Narrow down your search: use Refine Results
Select the subjects you are interested and narrow your
search results
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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!
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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)
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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
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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
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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?
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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!
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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!
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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
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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
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Need help? Contact usFeatures presented here are basic, if you want to learn
advance features in WOS … write to us
For technical help, please direct to
If you are from: Please write to:
Japan [email protected]
Korea [email protected]
China [email protected]
Rest of APAC (including SEA, HK, Taiwan, India)
Stop Searching, Start Discovering
Thank You!Thank You!
Contact InformationTo view additional recorded training, please visit our website
http://science.thomsonreuters.com/training/
Stop Searching, Start Discovering
