Where do you search?

This post is about academic literature searches in particular. (I could write a whole dissertation about Web search in general.. wait.. I did.:)

In an attempt to consolidate advice for students about academic literature searches, a grad school peer of mine posted a helpful page of resources for tracking down literature of interest on various sociological topics. This made me wonder: what are people’s favorite resources for academic literature searches? It also relates to the discussion about bundling e-journals started by Chris the other day.

My first steps usually involve going to Web of Science (home of the Social Science Citation Index), Proquest and the Annual Reviews series. [Please note that doing searches on most of these is limited to subscribers.]

The great appeal of the Social Science Citation Index (and its science and humanities equivalents) is that it gives you a list of articles cited by the author(s) of the piece and also tells you who has cited the piece itself since its publication. This lets you plug into an entire discussion about the topic at hand.

I have noticed that Sociofile always makes it on such lists among sociologists even though I would never recommend that as an important resource because other databases seem to do a better job. I am thinking its continued popularity is due to inertia. It used to be one of few electronic resources sociologists used and so they keep referring to it. But nowadays, there are so many much more useful and comprehensive resources.

For one thing, I would stay away from very field-specific databases because so much relevant work – probably on just about any topic – is published in journals of other fields. So in the interest of cross-disciplinary fertilization, I would not want to exclude other sources.

Next is the whole question of getting access to full-text articles. That step sometimes involves going to other databases. When a library is really on top of things, it will have linked the various searches so you are told whether your results can be found in their collection.

This relates to the bundling e-journals discussion in that it is interesting to see which databases bundle which journals in their indexes. It would be wonderful to see a comparison chart of which databases index which journals. That way we could eliminate those that get covered by others (and libraries could even stop subscribing to them).

I’m curious to know what other resources people like regardless of the field.

Also, it’s probably worth noting that in addition to such database searches, it’s still worth running some searches on public Web search engines such as Google. Conference presentations, working papers, policy reports and other sources are often only available via such searching.