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Workshop research and information skills GEO1-2208 (Innovation Systems): 4A: journal articles

ASSIGNMENT: SEARCHING FOR ARTICLES

Time estimate: 20 minutes

  1. Have a look at the tips on the right.
  2. Using smart combinations of your search terms find two relevant articles using Scopus and write down the bibliographic details or import the records into Zotero.
  3. Taking the two articles you just found as a starting point use Scopus to find two more using the references of the citations (cited by) of these articles; export to Zotero or save the full PDFs of these articles.
  4. Search for two relevant articles using Google Scholar and export to Zotero.
  5. For one of the articles found in Google Scholar scan the list of citing articles (cited by ...).

Where to look for articles?

Articles can be found in almost all academic engines and databases. Filter on document type: articles.
Often used search engines for articles are (amongst others):

NB For articles in print journals you search for the journal title in WorldCat and request the right volume/issue

Articles in scientific journals can be cited. That is, an author uses an article as a source for his or her own work. The articles used are then listed in the bibliography/reference list of the new article.

You can therefore find articles via these reference lists, which we also call snowball searching.
You can also actively search for articles that cite a found source, we call this citation searching.

(see also Search methods)

There are specialised citation databases like Scopus and the Web of Science, but also Google Scholar is a good search engine to search for citations.

Citation searching is also a way to discover journals that publish articles on your subject. For instance go to the Journal Citation Reports.

Look for a well-known journal in your field and click on Cited Journal Data and Citing Journal Data. You will see lists of journals which contain citations to the well-known journal or, on the other hand, are cited by that journal. In this way you will get a network of related journals.

You are often specifically looking for peer-reviewed articles.

Peer review is a way of guaranteeing the scientific nature of an article. In peer review, an article is read and assessed anonymously by peers before publication. You can often find information about peer review on the magazine's website (in pages like: About this journal' or something similar). See also the LibGuide Evaluating sources.

There are several ways to search for peer-reviewed articles:​

  • Some search systems only contain articles from peer-reviewed journals, eg Scopus, Web of Science and many subject-specific databases. For this, read the information from the database itself.
  • Some search engines allow you to filter or limit to peer-reviewed articles. Note: this option is not reliable in all search systems. This option also exists in WorldCat, for example, but not all peer-reviewed articles are equally well described and the filter option is therefore not very useful here.
  • Watch the video How to recognize a peer reviewed article for more tips.

Newspaper articles can be found in specialised newspaper archives, such as:

  • Delpher for Dutch newspapers up to 1995
  • Nexis Uni for Dutch and foreign newspapers starting from ca. 1995 till now (for help in searching see the library website)
  • Over twenty other archives containing newspapers. Some even have text mining options. See the overview of search systems and filter by type "news and newspapers".

Scopus: multidisciplinary search for articles and book chapters, with citation data

ScopusScopus is a large search engine containing some 50 million scientific journal articles and conference proceedings. Its most important features are:

  • Multidisciplinarity: all disciplines are present, although arts and humanities still somewhat lagging
  • Contains almost exclusively material in the English language
  • Containing extensive citation information from articles (complete from 1996 onwards, but also many from older years)
  • Containing also data of (chapters of) ten of thousands of books
  • In Scopus many journals are indexed from the very first volume (sometimes even before 1900)
  • The default order of the search results list is chronological, but you can also sort by relevance
  • All sources searched with Scopus are peer reviewed
  • A search engine for patents is included

Scopus has an excellent coverage for the medical and natural sciences, technics and geosciences. Also the social sciences are well represented. Humanities is less well covered, but we are still talking about millions of articles, absolutely speaking.

Scopus offers very good options to follow the network of citations between articles.

In the special LibGuide Scopus UBU LibGuide Scopus you will find detailed information about all the possibilities and bonuses of Scopus.

Google Scholar: fast and with full text search

Google Scholar is a large search engine for scholarly publications. It searches primarily journal articles and, contrary to almost all other search engines, searches the full text. From Google Books the data of a large number of scientific books are included in Google Scholar. Also in this respect Google Scholar differs from classical scientific search engines such as Scopus or Web of Science.

Google Scholar's special features listed:

  • you search articles as well as (a selection of) books
  • your search is full text, so you will also find sources in which your search terms are only touched upon
  • Google Scholar does not tell you what publications are included and what publications are not: you will have to find out by trial and error
  • the journal selection is less strict than in Web of Science or Scopus: as a result you will also find non-peer reviewed material
  • the order of results is also based on the number of received citations: that is why more recent publications are harder to find; always use the menu to filter on recent years!
  • only if you access Google Scholar via the Utrecht University Library website you will be shown the UBUlink next to the titles

In the special Google Scholar LibGuide UBU LibGuide Google Scholar you will find all you want to know about successfully using this remarkable search engine