Using the Internet for Journal Resources

Finding Journal Articles

In research we do not use standard internet search engines like "google" or "yahoo" we use specific journal based search engines

SCOPUS is one resource for searching for research on a topic. Scopus is accessed through your university login, click on this link: Scopus and then follow the instructions below:

• keep "Search within" unchanged (ie all fields) and enter a search term "xxx" in the "Search documents" box
  
• select "+ add a search field" and select Authors and enter the name of your academic in the form {last-name, first initial}, for example "{Hunt, P.}", the curly brackets force an exact search of the text within the brakets, otherwise it will default to Hunt AND P.
• click on "Add date range" and select from 2020
• click on search
• you should see something like this
  
• there are often many researchers with the same name, so you will sometimes need to check individual publications are for the author you are looking for, in this case only my publications come up.
• lets look at the second paper, you can see the title, a list of authors, the journal the paper is published in, the publication year, and the number of citations the paper has, now hover your mouse over the title and click
  
• you should now see a scopus summary for the paper, normally we look at the abstract to decide if this is a paper relevant to our research
  
• if the paper is relevant, you want to go to the publishers website, click on "full text options" and select "view at publisher"
  
  
• you can now read the paper on-line. Scroll through the whole paper, look at the various sections on the web-page
  
• read the introduction and perhaps choose a reference to follow by clicking on the reference citation
• click on "cited by" to find who has cited the paper (if the paper is very recent there may be no entry here)
  
  
• follow through on one of the papers which cite your paper of interest
  
  
• once you have all your papers, and you have discussed the abstract with your partner, raise your hand for an academic to check your work. If you need to wait, or you finish early, go to the extra questions given in the introduction