How to do an Effective Literature Search?

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How to do an Effective Literature Search?

• Application Training Module Series I
• by Customer Education Team
• ts.training.asia_at_thomson.com

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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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Lets 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
Use wildcard to help you! Put an after the
word to retrieve all combinations of words from 0
to infinity characters

• 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)

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Take note will get what you want and those you
dont want

• Note that ence will also get you
• Encephalitis
• Encephalic
• Encephala
• Enceinte
• etc
• ?Be selective!

Immediately you identify the word encephalitis
from your search results!
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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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Dont 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!
Dont forget References is another great source
to explore relevant articles
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Follow up? Its 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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Dont 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

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Need help? Contact us

• Features presented here are basic, if you want to
  learn advance features in WOS write to us
• ts.training.asia_at_thomson.com
• For technical help, please direct to

If you are from Please write to
Japan ts.support.jp_at_thomson.com
Korea ts.support.korea_at_thomson.com
China ts.support.china_at_thomson.com
ANZ ts.support.anz_at_thomson.com
Rest of APAC (including SEA, HK, Taiwan, India) ts.support.asia_at_thomson.com
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Thank You!
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Contact Information

• To view additional recorded training, please
  visit our website
• http//science.thomsonreuters.com/training/