Very essentially, often underestimated, most poorly done, about what am I talking? Of course of the literature search! The literature search is a very important and powerful tool and helps you to save a lot of time and performing good experiments. Three main purposes are behind a literature search:
1. Find information concerning your experiment achieved by other groups (part I).
2. Keep you up of the progress in your research field (part II).
3. Getting new ideas :) …
In this post I write about the first part, presenting some useful webpages for literature search. The second part follows end of the week (introducing the virtual journals).
Today, nearly all scientific information are online available in the internet. But the challenge is to find it! To do so, many search pages exist which are in parallel checking different databases about your request. Probably your university or institute offers such a search machine too. In science, probably the best search page is:
web of knowledge
The page is well done, user friendly and contains a lot of background information.
Another way (which I really like) is to search directly on the journal homepage. Every (good) journal has today a (advanced) search function. In Optics, most of the relevant articles are published in the journals of the “Optical Society of America” briefly OSA. The link to the journal page is:
Opticsinfobase
You can search on all journals or on specified ones. If you have found an interesting paper, have a look at its references and citings. They are often listed with titles and links to their PDFs. I am sure it contains a lot of interesting papers for you. With time you will notice an author who have several publications on the same field. Check their group homepage! Normally, their full publications list (even PDFs) is online.
An – unusual – approach is to search publications by google. Either by google, or its version for science:
scholar.google.com
It is not as good as the other possibilities, but I had already some nice surprises with scholar google.
Another exotic way but it is worth to mention it, is the:
arxiv server
Papers can there be pre-published before they are accepted or rejected by a journal. Some communities, like the quantum information one, are nearly publishing every article on this server too.
To complete the first part, I want to draw your attention to the:
Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology
It is an open-access encyclopedia with around 570 articles, and it explains the physical principles and common techniques in laser technology.
At the end, please remember that every search machine is worthless if you use the wrong keywords. But with some training you will quickly learn the suitable ones ;).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Nice post!
ReplyDeleteI would add another tip: the RSS feeds.
They are really easy to use and keep you updated about the latest advances in your field of interest. To subscribe to an RSS you just need to create an account in a reader (such as Google Reader) and add the RSS . Usually, you find a link on the webpage; just copy and paste it. In some other cases (such as in this blog!), simply click on the RSS icon and choose your reader; it will automatically be added to your account.
thanks!
ReplyDeleteRSS feeds are very helpful and important. I will introduce them in my second part together with the virtual journals. I decided to split my post into two because it simple gets to long.