Exploiting information: getting the most from the OU Library

Nicola Dowson and Wendy Mears

21 March 2012

Our session will cover..

• Literature review and sources of help • Keeping up to date• Bibliographic management tools

A good literature review will..• clarify your understanding of the field • explain the rationale for your research • place your research within a broader context • evaluate the results of previous research • define key concepts and ideas • identify research in related areas that are generalisable

or transferable to your topic • identify relevant methodological issues.• (taken from Uni New England library website:• http://www.une.edu.au/library/eskillsplus/literature/litreview.php

Lit review - doing it well

• Comprehensive searching• Citation searching• Good record keeping

Help and training resources • Information skills for researchers on Library website • Training sessions, online or F2F• Subject specialists within the Library• Immediate help via Library helpdesk

Keeping up to date

• Introducing you to ways of keeping up-to-date using electronic tools

Email alerts, RSS feeds and tracking engines allow you to:

• Set up, save and re-run your searches against latest additions to databases

• Set up profiles to receive automatically the contents pages of journal issues

• Receive notification of articles recently published and added to a database

• Keep up to date with breaking news• Discover new resources in your field

Email alerting services• Two types

–Journal table of contents(TOC) based

–Search based: keywords, authors, subject

• Examples

–Zetoc Alert

–TicTOCs: http://www.tictocs.ac.uk

–IEEE Explore

Zetoc• Zetoc provides access to the

British Libraries Electronic Table

of Contents of around 20,000

current journals and around 16,000

conference proceedings published

per year

Other updating tools (1) • Setting up RSS feeds

–iGoogle: http://.google.com/ig

–Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/

–Netvibes: http://www.netvibes.com

• Social networking tools

–ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net

Other updating tools (2)• Social bookmarking

–Diigo: http://www.diigo.com

• Social citation sharing

–Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com

• Tracking website changes

–TrackEngine: http:www.trackengine.com/servlets/com.nexlabs.trackengine.ui.Login

Bibliographic management tools