The most important skill to master as you do research is learning how to do these three things well:
Most people are just used to "googling" something: typing random words in a box and getting thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of random results, and then scanning through the top 10. Rinse and repeat. This isn't effective in academic research, and you'll need to develop a better technique for finding information.
Articles in the trade literature are usually written by journalists and are not peer-reviewed. They report news and developments in industry, regulatory systems, and markets. When searching for this kind of information, pay special attention to publication dates.
Searchable cited references provided for more than 1,200 journals. Contains detailed author profiles for the 20,000 most-cited authors in the database.
Additional full text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, and SWOT analyses.
This database was formerly called Dow Jones Interactive.
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The technical literature is the collective body of publications, in many formats, that report the results of research. These reports are written by the researchers themselves. Journals publish articles that are usually peer-reviewed. Other formats, such as conference papers, patents, and technical reports are not peer-reviewed but may be vetted in different ways. To search in the technical literature you'll use a different selection of databases than you would for trade news.
The Web of Science platform currently also provides temporary access to several databases that are not part of the Core Collection, including Biosis Citation Index, Data Citation Index, and Zoological Record.
Use this link to access Google Scholar, and see our Google Scholar Guide for information on using this resource.
If you encounter a warning about the security certificate when using the FindIt@UT tool in Google Scholar, you can learn more about that using this guide.
Journal articles are indexed for MEDLINE using NLM's controlled vocabulary, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Citations are created by the National Library of Medicine, International MEDLARS partners, and cooperating professional organizations.
MEDLINE has worldwide coverage, but 88% of the citations in current MEDLINE are to English-language sources and 76% have English abstracts.
NLM provides free access to MEDLINE through PubMed.
A number of trade magazines cover the chemical and process industries. Unfortunately, their native web sites are not open without a personal or corporate subscription. Some full text of articles (without graphics) can be found in ABI/Inform and Business Source Complete, while others have to be consulted via the library's print holdings. Some of them are described in our Chemical Engineering Economics guide.
Newspaper coverage tells us about events as they happened, without the advantage of longer analysis and the passage of time. While in depth investigative journalism can provide excellent background and insight into important topics, it's becoming much rarer these days.
Newspaper content can be hard to track down. Most newspapers put their articles behind subscription paywalls and access via the library is hit or miss and constantly changing. Due to cost, we can't provide direct access to many major metropolitan newspapers that you may want to see, but some of them can be found within aggregator databases such as Nexis Uni and Factiva (see box above).
An index is a database that allows you to search for published literature. This can include many formats, such as peer-reviewed research articles, news, conference papers, patents, reports, and more.
Index databases don't usually contain the full text of documents they index, but they almost always provide a link to a digital copy of record. Some indexes like Academic Source and Business Source do contain some full text.
No. Indexes show you what's been published. They provide a link to start a search for the full text, and we will have some of it, but there's a lot of content that we don't have direct access to. You can use Interlibrary Services to get copies though.
You have access to hundreds of databases of all types and subjects via the Libraries. Here's where you can find a list of them all:
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