Thank you to all the new research students who worked so hard in today’s session in the library.

Given how many tools we covered in the morning, I thought it might be helpful to provide a list of these, with links, so you can revisit them later at your leisure.  You’ll see that there are a few extra tools that were mentioned today but not explored.

We started by looking at university and external resources:

• Library catalogue – all the library’s physical resources, and many electronic resources too.  Use ‘My Account‘ to view and renew your loans.
• NELSON – search for electronic resources
• A-Z list of databases – access point for the library’s individual databases
• Find my reference – find out if you can get access to a specific journal article
• EThOS – PhD theses from the British Library (on campus you can also use Index to Theses)
• Inter library loans – request an item from the British Library
• SCONUL Access – request access to another university library
• Skills Hub – guides, videos, online tutorial and more on all types of study skill

We then moved on to some popular citation databases:

• Science Direct – check out the top 25 hottest articles, citation counts and links to related articles
• Web of Science – perform a search and create a citation report for the results
• Google Scholar – perform an advanced search and note the ‘Cited by’ counts and links to FindIt@UoN
• Publish or Perish – use this downloadable tool to calculate additional bibliometric measures based on Google Scholar results

Lastly we looked at ways of creating alerts to keep up to date with your subject area:

• Search alerts from scholarly databases e.g. Science Direct, Web of Science – perform a search and then save it as an alert
• Tables of contents e.g. ZETOC, JournalTOCs
• Publisher alerts e.g. Sage ‘My Tools’
• Subject community mailing lists e.g. JiscMail (look in the tag cloud for subject areas or use the search box to find a suitable list)

Don’t forget, you may need to register with each service to save searches or create alerts.

If you have any questions about anything we covered today then just get in touch with Miggie or Nick.

Once you have had a go with the different resources, think about contacting your Academic Librarian for some specialist help in searching the resources for your thesis.