Conference literatureConference papers can be difficult to find but they are valuable because they describe cutting-edge research.  This session will enable you to find out about conferences which are coming up and also locate the published papers of proceedings which have taken place. 

Roger Mills and Judy Reading

WISER Focus on

• Discuss topics of interest to you with a group of like-minded peers

• Get ideas about practice elsewhere • Track latest developments in your field• Present research papers and get feedback / peer review• Develop a network of contacts

Conferences allow you to:

Use the web• Internet gateways are very useful in identifying upcoming

conferences and also key organisations and mailing lists which will ensure you are in the loop for the future

eg look at SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk/• PINAKLES lists web hubs for all subject areas

http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html• The Resource Discovery Network is being re-organised as

INTUTE http://www.intute.ac.uk/development/

Also try …• Google

• Ads in key journals.

• Mailing lists (jiscmail.ac.uk good starting point)

• Brochures, mailshots and Department notice-boards

• http://www.allconferences.com

• Search Library catalogue for proceedings of conferences – will suggest relevant organisations to track down for the future

• Organisational web-sites

• Ask your subject librarian and look out for library subject guides

Psychology examples

• Look under events on SOSIG Psychology http://www.sosig.ac.uk/psychology/

• Also look at the site for the American Psychological Association www.apa.org.uk – see archives at http://www.apa.org/archives/

• British Psychological Association www.bpd.org.uk

see proceedings at http://www.bps.org.uk/publications/proceedings/proceedings_home.cfm

Refugee and forced migration

• Look at Forced Migration Online http://www.forcedmigration.org

- click on the web catalogue button on the left-hand side and include “conference” in your search

Join forced-migration mailing list at jiscmail.acuk

- Click on discussion list button from FMO homepage above

The Refugee Studies Library has large numbers of conference papers on their web catalogue at http://bodley.ox.ac.uk/rsc

Useful OXLIP databases are Zetoc, Sociological Abstracts and Sigle

Education exampleEducation Online service athttp://www.leeds.ac.uk/bei/• Education-line is a freely accessible database of the full text of conference

papers, working papers and electronic literature which supports educational research, policy and practice.

• The Education Conference Listings Service presents a freely accessible calendar for education and training related conferences as notified by their organisers and giving information about conference locations, content and contact details.

• The Education Conference Programme Service presents freely searchable programmes and event archives for conferences of organisations which sponsor the service on behalf of their delegates and organisation members.

Locating conference papers

• If you are given a reference to a conference paper that doesn’t mean it was necessarily published!

• Recent papers might be on web – try searching on the paper title, author, organisation name or the conference name

• Sometimes you can quite easily track down the author and they will send you a copy

• If conference papers are not available in Oxford the Library Services can usually get hold of it for you through inter-library loan

Searching library holdings in Oxford University

• When searching OLIS for a conference paper you need to search for the proceedings of the conference rather than the specific paper

• Conferences are treated as corporate authors

• Published proceedings may have different title to the original

• Publisher may be different from conference organiser

• Use tw= for words in title if a straight title search is fruitless

• OLIS has no option to limit by document type so you need to use keyword search and include ‘proceedings’ ‘conference’, ‘symposi*’ etc as keywords alongside subject terms

Other Library catalogues• See OXLIP under Worldwide Library Catalogues• Especially useful for UK is COPAC or British Library

Catalogue• You can ask for Inter-library loan of identified conferences

Conferences at the British Library

• The British Library catalogue can be searched at www.catalogue.bl.uk/ and catalogue subset search allows you to limit to conference proceedings

• The ZETOC service – http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ provides access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC). The database contains details of approximately 20,000 current journals and 16,000 conference proceedings published per year. With almost 15 million article and conference records, the database covers every imaginable subject in science, technology, medicine, engineering, business, law, finance and the humanities. The database covers the years from 1993 to date and is updated daily. Copies of all the articles and conference papers listed on the database are available from the British Library's Document Supply Centre in Yorkshire.

To take advantage of the ZETOC Alerts service you will need an Athens personal username and password

ProceedingsFirst• Covers every published congress, symposium, conference, exposition,

workshop and meeting received by The British Library Document Supply Centre.

• Contains in each record a list of the papers presented at each conference. • Subjects: conference proceedings, meetings, congresses, symposia,

exhibitions, workshops• Sources Included in each record.• Number of records 169,000+• Dates covered1993 to present• UpdatedSemiweekly (twice a week)• Available through OXLIP – see

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/oxlip/index.html and search title index or under general bibliographic tools

PapersFirst• OCLC index of papers presented at conferences worldwide• Covers every published congress, symposium, conference, exposition,

workshop and meeting received by The British Library Document Supply Centre.

• Database details • SubjectsThe wide variety of subjects discussed at the covered meetings.• Sources Included in each record.• Number of recordsOver 5,700,000• Dates covered1993 to present• Updated Semimonthly (twice a month)• Available through OXLIP – see http://

www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/oxlip/index.html and search title index or under general bibliographic tools

ISI Index to Scientific and Technical Proceedings (1990-) (Web of Knowledge Proceedings)

• ISTP indexes the published literature of the most significant conferences,

symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions in a wide range of disciplines in science and technology.

• ISTP covers only publications in which the proceedings are published for the first time, and only those which contain complete papers, not just abstracts.

• Coverage includes international proceedings, and is not limited to those in the English language.

• Published proceedings may be included from a number of sources; books or series produced by publishers or societies, reports, sets of preprints (when preprints are the only publications from a conference) or journals.

• More than 1100 conferences are added with each quarterly update, guaranteeing access to current research from the most significant conference literature in science and technology.

Conference Papers Index (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts)

Conference Papers provides citations to papers and poster sessions presented at major scientific meetings around the world.

• Subject emphasis since 1995 has been in the life sciences, environmental sciences and the aquatic sciences, while older material also covers physics, engineering and materials science.

• Information is derived from final programs, abstracts booklets and published proceedings, as well as from questionnaire responses.

• Records include complete ordering information to obtain preprints, abstracts, proceedings and other publications derived from the conference, together with title and author information needed to track the specific papers.

Subject databasesYou can check subject and general databases for options to

limit by conference as document type eg:

Biological Abstracts

Sociological Abstracts

SIGLE : System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe

SciFinder Scholar (Chemical Abstracts)

Engineering Index – Compendex

Web of Science

INSPEC (for physics)

To summarise• Identify relevant organisations and mailing lists to ensure you are

in the loop about conferences coming up• The web is an essential tool and may enable you to link to the full-

text of papers online• You can search for conference papers in Oxford and in the

holdings of other libraries especially the British Library• Inter-library loans can be arranged for you• There are specific databases for conference proceedings • Many general or subject indexing databases allow you to search

for conference proceedings• If we can help we will – make sure you know your subject librarian

– see http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/collections/librarians