How to do an Effective Literature Search?

Stop Searching, Start Discovering

The scenarios
I just join as new graduate students and I am not
sure how to do a literature search
I have been into research for sometimes now but I
spend a lot of time to get the articles I want
I wanted to start a new research work, how can I
get the right literature in the shortest possible
time?

If you experience similar concerns, this module

may help you to do an effective literature search
How to start?
There are many ways to begin literature search,
generally we have:
Keywords (most commonly use)
Begin from a paper given by your mentor
References from a given paper
Journals in your interest of subject areas
Authors, if you know some

As a beginner, we will only talk about keyword

search in topics or titles
Lets start
For example, we want to do a search in Japanese
encephalitis, a virus transmitted from mosquitoes
and very prevalent in Southeast Asia and the Far
East
But you did not know how to spell encephalitis
What can we do?
Use Wildcards!
 Here is how wildcard works

Use wildcard to
help you!
Put an * after the
word to retrieve all
combinations of
words from 0 to
infinity characters

Under Topic Search, just type in Japanese ence* and hit button search
The search will return all combinations of words begin with ence
Other wildcards include: ? (if it is only one character) $ (if it is 0 to one character)
 Take note * will get what you want and those
you dont want

Note that ence*

will also get you: Immediately you
Encephalitis identify the word
encephalitis from
Encephalic your search results!
Encephala
Enceinte
etc
Be selective!
Now just want to retrieve the right results?
Japanese Encephalitis is a type of disease, which
used to call Japanese B Encephalitis
Use inverted commas to get the exact words

Use inverted
commas to get
the exact terms
Use Search History to combine your search
results

The total records

found
Narrow down your search: use Refine Results

Select the subjects you are

interested and narrow your
search results
Refine further to get what you want

Refine further to retrieve

only review articles and
now you left 46 articles to
read and select

Note: you can repeat

this refine process in
different orders and
combinations to get
result sets you want!
 Which one to read first? Why not go for highly
cited articles first

Sort your result sets

using Times Cited
Note: You can also and get those highly
sort by author if that cited articles appear
helps you to retrieve on first page
faster. (Be aware that
selection of articles is
necessary, never
expect one search to
get all relevant results
The good news is
you have only 46 to
scan instead of 2720)
 Got what you want? Drill down to read more ...

Get the full text if your

library subscribes to the
journal. Get information
directly from NCBI also

Running out of keywords? Try

KeyWords Plus, you may find
more relevant keywords suggested
by references authors
Dont stop here explore from here

Interesting! Ever think of why this

article has been cited so many
times? What papers are these?
Find out more click from here

Looking for articles sharing the

same references? Explore from
here!

Dont forget: References is

another great source to
explore relevant articles
Follow up? Its easy right from here

Want to follow up? Create an

Citation Alert and get email
whenever this article gets new
citation

Why not checking the Impact Factor

of the journal or maybe other relevant
contents?
 Dont forget: You also have Citation
Map to help you!
You will be surprised to find out that an article in Virology
has applications in:
Immunology
Infectious Diseases
Microbiology
Neurosciences
Pediatrics etc
Ten different new application fields!

Use Citation Map today you new

way to discover hidden applications!
 Get organize start from beginning

Save selected records

into EndNote or EndNote
Web. Remember: Manage
of references takes time,
so start managing them
now

Do you know? EndNote

Web comes free for
Web of Science and
EndNote users!
Last note to take
Effective literature search really depends on many
factors, some of which are:
How much you have known a subject
Your research experience
Guidance from mentors
Your library resources access to the right literature, etc

And vary from discipline to discipline

Always remember
Literature search is an iterative process
You must do it from time to time throughout your
course of research
Selective contents and tools in Web of Science
(WOS) get you the right literature, not overload you
with irrelevant literature Effective search
In simple terms If you can get relevant literature
effectively within 3 months using WOS, why bother
to spend one year or even longer just to do similar
search without WOS?
You have a choice
Stop Searching, Start Discovering
Need help? Contact us
Features presented here are basic, if you want to learn advance
features in WOS write to us
ts.training.asia@thomson.com
For technical help, please direct to
If you are from: Please write to:

Japan ts.support.jp@thomsonreuters.com

Korea ts.support.korea@thomsonreuters.com

China ts.support.china@thomsonreuters.com

ANZ ts.support.anz@thomsonreuters.com

Rest of APAC (including ts.support.asia@thomsonreuters.com

SEA, HK, Taiwan, India)
Stop Searching, Start Discovering
Thank You!

Stop Searching, Start Discovering

Contact Information
To view additional recorded training, please visit our website
http://science.thomsonreuters.com/training/