Comments on: Where do you search?

By: rowan

rowan — Sat, 04 Oct 2003 18:01:14 +0000

Thanks for having this conversation and for putting the resource links in. It is a great resource for students (I am passing it along to my students), and it’s great to see what tools people are using.

By: eszter

eszter — Sat, 04 Oct 2003 16:43:01 +0000

SFX was what I was referring to when I noted that some libraries tell you where you can get the full text of journals. Thanks, I couldn’t remember the name. (Princeton offers that as well.) It’s clear after some searches that there is a lot of redundancy in what e-journal bundles offer.

By: claxton6

claxton6 — Sat, 04 Oct 2003 02:04:58 +0000

The University of Maryland has a nice system where, for all the search engines they subscribe to, you can enter the name of a journal you’re interested in, and see which of them search it and whether they offer full text. I’d kill for that right now, as I’m having a tough time finding a good place to search for urban planning and development literature. So far, the best appears to be WebOfScience. On the other hand, the University of Michigan offers SFX (I don’t know how widely used this is), which, once you’ve found an article of interest, will tell you where to go in other databases to get the full text of that article.

By: brayden

brayden — Fri, 03 Oct 2003 22:35:59 +0000

For historical articles (they can be social science history) I use America: History & Life. It’s nice because it not only searches national journals but also smaller, local journals (like Nevada Historical Society Quarterly).

By: John

John — Fri, 03 Oct 2003 19:57:13 +0000

Well, for reviews and articles JSTOR is good

By: Shai

Shai — Fri, 03 Oct 2003 18:54:52 +0000

I use web of science, more specific indexes (see here) annual reviews, encyclopedias, general reference works (for background and references). I troll my favorite journals once every couple of weeks, but the uni also has a program that will auto email citation or key word searches from web of science when it's updated every week (good if you have a long term interest in some paper or topic). For computer science, I use citeseer, arxiv, the acm digital library etc. then I have Rosen, Handbook of Discrete and Combinatorial Mathematics, Rudin, Knuth, etc. and various algorithms books. More generally I'll check out Nature and Science, and read books reviewed, or listed in books received. google I'll often use for a quick fix, a bibliography, to find working papers, etc. And of course I'll physically search around the stacks. If I know the library of congress call number for one book there's sometimes something similar in the vicinity. Randomly picking a book off the shelf doesn't work very well, but I do sometimes check out what people have left behind after they were finished reading. I'm only a student but I imagine it can't be much different for anyone else.