Latest revision as of 11:10, 1 March 2010

[edit] Introduction

LitSearch mainpage

Searching databases by category

This is a short introduction to the literature search facility of Sheffield Hallam University's Learning Center.

The tutorial is based on a lesson given by Roger Hines, the information specialist of the Learning Center.

[edit] Accessing

1. Log in using this page.
2. Access the LitSearch site with your browser and follow the instructions.
3. Search for a database by name or category
4. Access the particular database.

[edit] Notable Databases

Thesaurus of INSPEC

INSPEC search history

IEEE PAMI

METADEX mainpage

ISI Web of Science offers Cited Reference Search

[edit] INSPEC

INSPEC (accessed via Engineering Village) is a database of references. It offers an interface to search over a large range of different publications. INSPEC offers the facility to extend the search over Compendex as well. Note that Compendex is using the american-english Thesaurus in contrast to INSPEC, which is a british-english database.

• The two Thesauri are containing the tree of known search terms of each database.
• The search history allows to reuse and combine (f.e. #5 AND #7) search-queries.
• You can search for a phrase by using quotation marks (f.e. "computer vision").
• My Profile can be used for saving search queries and for setting up e-mail alerts for new papers matching a given search term.

[edit] IEEE Xplore

IEEE Xplore has many useful articles for machine vision and related fields. Especially the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence are useful when doing work in this field.

[edit] METADEX

METADEX is the database of choice for materials engineers.

[edit] ISI Proceedings/ISI Web of Science

ISI Web of Science offers Cited Reference Search with search patterns: One can determine, wether a particular publication or author is being referenced in newer publications.

[edit] ZETOC

ZETOC offers a powerful bibliography search. Especially useful is the e-mail reminder service: It can send you the table of contents, whenever a new issue of a journal is being published.

[edit] Other Notable Databases

• ACM Digital Library
• Index to Theses is a database of abstracts of PhD theses. It can be very useful to find out about recent research in a specific area.
• SCOPUS has a citation search with limit to and exclude feature.
• LexisNexis Executive is a full-text database of news and company information taken from approximately 2,500 international publications.
• ComSoc (including IEEE Communications)
  • There is no full IEEE access unfortunately. However you can use ZETOC to get e-mail notifications about IEEE publications matching certain criteria and get the articles by inter-library loan).

[edit] Notable Journals

It is also possible to access the pages of some journals directly using the LitSearch authentification. F.e.:

• ScienceDirect (offers fulltext search)
• SpringerLink (offers fulltext search)

[edit] External Links

• Learning Center
• Sheffield Hallam Library Gateway
• Sheffield Hallam Library Catalogue
• LitSearch
• LitSearch Tutorials
• Library News for Aces (Blog)