Effective Searching Missy Harvey Computer Science Librarian

Should We Just Use Google? Many of us jump immediately onto Google or Google Scholar We’ll find some helpful hits But we may have to spend hours weeding through the hits Google is not exhaustive so we potentially miss a great deal of research So what’s the alternative?

The Alternative Target your research I can help you ensure that you’re finding the majority of what is available on your topic How? Let’s begin with the University Libraries website:

Click on Articles & Databases and then click on Databases A-Z

Choosing the Best Tools The Libraries have hundreds of databases with a significant amount of research not found in Google and Google Scholar If trying to be exhaustive in your research, then for computer science topics, search: ACM Digital Library IEEE Xplore INSPEC Web of Science

Why Not Just One Tool? We should search all four of those databases rather than just one None of them covers everything that’s published (just like Google) They have some overlap But we need to search all of them to ensure we don’t miss any important research

Web of Science Searching Let’s experiment with Web of Science (WoS) to see how we can target our research Important: when performing a search in any database, experiment using a variety of synonyms Sometimes we’re not always quite sure what those synonyms may be

Sample Search Let’s search on: keystroke dynamics Sometimes we’re searching on a topic that uses various words to describe it So to target our research, try to pin down the various words and phrases to use The next slide is an example hit I highlighted in red synonyms we should use

Honing Our Search So let’s redo our search using some of those synonyms I’ve highlighted how to correctly link the words in our search

Refining Our Search On the left side, WoS provides a wide variety of ways to refine our results Under Document Types, we see that the most hits are Articles and Proceedings Papers (from conferences) But what it we only want a review, we could choose that option

Refining Our Search We see which authors and what sources, i.e., journals, conferences, and book series have published the most on this topic These are all ways to refine our search to better target what precisely we need

Additional Tools On the right side of the window, near the bottom are two important tools to help us find more research References: the bibliography the author listed at the end of their article Always look at these references because they will lead you to more hits on this topic Look at the bibliographies in those articles as well This process is called Footnote Chasing Related Records may also help connect you to additional research

Reverse Citations One of the most powerful tools of WoS is its ability to show us how frequently an article has been cited by others On the right side we see the quantity of citations, as well as the individual articles titles We can click on any of them to go directly to those citations

New Visual Tool WoS is offering a fascinating new tool that is still in beta It shows us visually a citation map, i.e., a trail of who has cited whom on this topic You can view citations going forwards and backwards It’s an extremely powerful tool that we’re just beginning to learn how to use fully

Here’s an example of a 1-generation citation map for an article

Move Onto Other Resources All of what we’ve covered here are tools available in Web of Science I encourage you to search the other databases mentioned earlier You need to ensure you do not miss anything of importance in your research

For Additional Help Remember that at any time, feel free to contact me for additional help: Missy Harvey Computer Science Librarian Blog: Website: