If you need… |
then start with… |
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An overview of the literature on a topic
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A citation index*
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The full text of a citation or Articles from a specific journal |
A publisher database* Not sure where to go? Journal Finder |
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To check if your keywords are any good |
* Find these on the A-Z Databases list (log into Okta if prompted)
Citation indexes can be broad in subject, such as Scopus and Web of Science, or more narrowly focused on a discipline: SciFinder in the area of chemistry, or PubMed for biomedical research.
Scopus and Web of Science track how papers are cited through a large but select list of academic journals, and it is through this citation analysis that you can get a sense of what people have written and what, based on the citations, are considered important papers in the field. You should do your search in both to make sure you're catching everything, as, while there is a fair amount of overlap, they draw from different collections of publications.
SciFinder is useful as a means of finding articles based on subjects in chemistry and related subjects because it has search capabilities that allow chemistry researchers to connect the substances and reactions they're working on to the research written about them. Look for the "Full Text" link for each citation to read the articles you're interested in.
PubMed will occasionally link to the full text of articles, either in PubMed Central (a repository of open access articles) or on the publisher website/database. If you can't find full text that way, take the title of the article you want and search for it (in quotes) in the Library search bar to find out if we have access to it through our subscriptions.
This link opens in a new windowYou may find the articles you need in a citation database like Scopus or SciFinder, but if tracking the full text from those databases keeps leading you to a publisher's database, consider searching directly in those sources.
Look here for access to journals provided by the journal publishers. Searching a publisher database can be more useful than one of the broader-topic databases if you know that the subject you're looking for is a major focus for a particular publisher, as these databases will have current coverage of some journals we may only have with an embargo in other databases.
Search by keyword or your program to find the right database for your research.
Example: "mechanical engineering"
Note: This search bar will provide you with a list of Library subscription databases by keyword so you can look for your topic in the right place; this does not search within the databases.
Preprints are the final draft of a research article prior to its submission to a journal and therefore before it has been peer reviewed.
⚠️ Use preprints with caution ⚠️: If you find and want to use a preprint in your work, first check to see if it's since been published, what's known as the "version of record," and use that instead. It is not advisable to use a preprint that was never published (which you can tell based on the date of the document), as that might indicate it was judged insufficient for publication.
If you do use a preprint, acknowledge in your text and the references list that it is one, so your readers can know to take the lack of peer review verification into account.
