Definition and search ofscientific articles

Tord Heljebergtord.heljeberg@mdh.se

021-101641

www.mdh.se/bib/

The historical perspective

Oral presentations, letters, books Learned societies Priority disputes between scientists

very common First journals in 1665, England & France 18th century – 1000 journals published

Modern times 20 th century – expanding research at

growing numbers of universities – more specialised research:

growing economic interest of commercial publishers

Increased library subscription prices

Important aspects of scientific journals:

Establishing of priority (who is first) High quality through the peer

review process Archiving

Alternative publishing

Open Access – ArXiv, Doaj et.c Economic models Peer review? Why publish in Open access journals?

MdU Library journal collection

About 9000 electronic journals <50% scientific journals Millions of scientific fulltext articles Access from within university network –

also externally

Articles published/spread outside scientific journals:

Articles in conference proceedings. Not always peer reviewed. Research

described is sometimes in progress.

Professional magazines

Technical reports, working papers

Scientific articles should be cited:

Because of high quality - they seldom contain faults

To give your own text higher credibility

To assure that the readers of your document will be able to access the documents you cite

Library databases:

Reference databases – gives short descriptions of articles

OR

Full text databases – complete articles

A database search begins by choosing search terms

Free terms – search terms defined by you.

Controlled terms –terms defined by the database producer. Controlled terms are chosen from a term list – a thesaurus

Use search operators to combine search terms

AND

OR

NOT

cats OR dogs

cats AND dogs

”guinea pigs” NOT (mouse OR mice)

Proximity operators – WITHIN (w/?), NEAR, SAME

Cats w/50 Dogs

Truncation

Use only a part of a term to retrieve terms with different term endingsTruncation symbols: * or (sometimes) !

retrieves: Network, Networks ,Networking etc..

Be careful ! Color*Retrieves: Color, Colored etc. but also: Colorado

Network*

INSPEC /Compendex Covers

publications in engineering research

Contain 15+ million references

Index: journals and conference proceeedings, reports

ISI Web of science Reference journal

databases Covers science

and technology, social sciences and humanities

Can be used for citation searches

Science Direct Full text database 1800 journals 60 scientific computer science

journals Full text from 1995- Truncation with !-mark

IEEE Xplore / ACM Dig. Libr. Full text databases About 170 journals +conference

proceedings and IEEE standards IEEE Xplore, 1988- ACM Digital Library, 1985-

Elin@Malardalen

In Elin you search several full text databases from one search interface

Google scholar

Article search

Interlibrary loans Library card needed 40 SEK /article Online web order form Article delivery within a a week

Using web search engines you

Find literature that complements the literature found in commercial databases

Find information about innovative research not yet published in scientific articles

Find full text articles from freely available journals

Internet document check up: Who is the author? Has the author

published other articles/books? Where do you find the information?

On a university web site? On a private site? At a company internet site?

Can the author be contacted?

E-books in Ebrary 25.000, english, book titles High quality – recent publications Unlimited nr. of simultaneous users Save books in bookshelf Limited printouts & copying Titles added & removed monthly