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Research & Postgraduate Students

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"Know where to find the information and how to use it –
That’s the secret of success"

Albert Einstein

Search our Collections

Search for books, articles, news and more in our library discovery service.

 

When you find the book you want you'll see its shelf or class number, this will help you find it in the library.

For online items, like eBooks, click on the link to read online.

Citation Searching

Citation searching allows you to follow the research path forward and backwards in time, enabling you to understand how a research area has developed.

Looking into the past: Look at the references at the end of the paper to recognize which papers and researchers the author read and cited.

Looking into the future: Discover who has cited the article since it was published (Times cited).

To do a citation search Choose a core article or book that will form the target of your search (in publication for at least a year). Then locate a citation index such as Web of Science or Academic Search Complete.


Example

Here's an example of a Web of Science search sequence using Diener, E. (1999) Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress, as the target book citation:

  1. Go to Web of Science.
  2. Open the drop down menu by 'Basic Search' and select the 'Cited Reference Search' option.
  3. Enter the name of your author (Diener, E) and the year of publication (1999).
  4. Select Search.
  5. You will see a list of items published by Diener in 1999, which have been cited in the bibliographies of the articles in the database.
  6. Select the entries that correspond to your target and then select 'Finish Search'.
  7. Have a look at articles in the results list and use the mark feature to save them in a list of useful references.

To find a journal title use your library's eJournals/full text Ffinder tool search:

Library Databases

To search the literature more fully, you should explore individual databases by searching the A-Z list of library databases. Using the databases provided by the Library will help you find reliable information from trusted sources.

We subscribe to over 70 databases, some are dedicated to a single subject others cover several subjects. It's important to note that most of our subscriptions are selective: we typically subscribe to only a portion of the content available on a given site. Just as we don't purchase copies of every book and journal in print, we don't subscribe to every e-book or online journal available!

There are a number of search strategies and techniques to help you retrieve relevant search results – including truncation and nesting - come to an advanced database training session to learn more.

Most of our databases are searchable on our library discovery service, this means you can search several databases at once.

However, some databases will have to be searched separately. 

Click on the Databases button on the library website to:

  1. see a full listing of our databases
  2. see which ones are indexed on our library discovery service
  3. search each database individually

 

Google Scholar Search

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