Questions tagged [literature-search]

Questions about finding specific papers, books, etc. pertaining to a topic. This includes the use of online databases such as Google Scholar or PubMed to find relevant articles.

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47 votes
11 answers
8k views

How can I find an old, obscure, or otherwise inaccessible paper when the usual methods fail?

I am trying and failing to find a particular paper. My university's library catalogue, Google Scholar, and Google all came up empty. I even tried the catalogue of the paper's institutional affiliation,...
schtandard's user avatar
19 votes
2 answers
672 views

How to search for list of papers citing both papers A and B?

For given papers A and B, I would like to search for all papers that cite both A and B. I guess one can generalize to papers {A,B,C,...} and find all papers that cite all of them. A quick Google ...
Victor V Albert's user avatar
16 votes
7 answers
5k views

How to identify the publications that cite two specific papers?

Finding the citations of any particular paper is straightforward. But how do you identify the set of publications that cite two specific papers? The reason I am asking this is because I am trying ...
Moa's user avatar
  • 1,746
8 votes
2 answers
438 views

How to locate most important literature in an unfamiliar area

I'm a pre-doctoral researcher (does it exist?) figuring out my true interests and learning the craft. When I start exploring a new (that is, unfamiliar) area, I try to find the most influential ...
ba_ul's user avatar
  • 363
23 votes
5 answers
10k views

How is a research direction determined between a graduate student and their advisor?

My question applies to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math disciplines (STEM). Q: By what process does a graduate student determine his or her research direction? (Assume that the graduate ...
Fraïssé's user avatar
  • 11.4k
22 votes
1 answer
1k views

Google Scholar vs other academic search engines

How is Google Scholar compared to other academic search engines and catalogues such as ScienceDirect, Scopus, and universities' own online catalogues--in terms of the following? comprehensiveness of ...
Orion's user avatar
  • 4,763
15 votes
3 answers
2k views

How to choose a good research problem?

I am working to get a PhD, maybe next year this time around. Currently, this is my second year. I have published 3 papers. All of them are not about one problem but consider different problems. My ...
Frank Moses's user avatar
4 votes
3 answers
1k views

How to build a list of seminal papers in a field?

This question is similar to this one, but focused on papers rather than on authors. Does anybody know of a systematic way to build a list of the most cited and/or influential papers in a discipline? ...
Pablo Suau's user avatar
37 votes
2 answers
61k views

Literature Review versus Literature Survey. What is the difference?

I have read several articles about literature reviews. At the same time I found some guides about literature surveys. I am confused... how is a literature survey different from a literature review? ...
Npn's user avatar
  • 515
28 votes
9 answers
5k views

How to get academic search engines only search in open access journals?

Sometimes I work from home, and for security reasons it is not possible to connect to the campus computers. I use Google Scholar for finding papers and so, but from home, most of the journals can not ...
Open the way's user avatar
  • 2,194
21 votes
3 answers
754 views

How to measure achievement in a field where large collaborations are normal?

In some fields of research, huge collaborations are the norm. This is especially true in experimental high-energy physics. Say I'm evaluating someone's resume, and that person is transitioning out of ...
user avatar
12 votes
1 answer
3k views

Why do papers sometimes appear unlinked in Google Scholar?

I would like to download this paper: O. Faure. Numerical pathwise approximation of stochastic differential equations. Applied stochastic models and data analysis, 1992. but when I use Google ...
Educ's user avatar
  • 239
12 votes
1 answer
11k views

Google scholar "sort by date" returns articles from last year only?

I am doing a pilot study for my research. When I search in google scholar, it gives me about 10 thousand results for the keywords that are anywhere in the article. I want to narrow my search down to ...
awatan's user avatar
  • 867
12 votes
3 answers
4k views

How to find only the papers that cite a particular article in an important way?

I'm having the following problem: There is some interesting paper (in machine learning) which is cited by 180 other papers (according to Google Scholar). From these 180, I want to find the papers that ...
cruvadom's user avatar
  • 221
10 votes
4 answers
4k views

Is there a way to find review articles by the keyword?

When I search for papers using some keywords in academic databases (like Google Scholar), there are lots of papers, but I would like to read literature reviews first because I’m new in that area. (By ...
huammmm1's user avatar
  • 103
8 votes
2 answers
458 views

What strategies are there for finding literature for a literature survey when the terminology used is diverse?

I want to write a literature survey on a topic, let's say it's risk of crime due to a new technology, let's say due to the Gutenberg press. However, when I search for the overall theme (crime and "...
Dr. Thomas C. King's user avatar
6 votes
3 answers
616 views

Is it ethical to do paid literature searches of research journals for other students?

Is it unethical to research journals for other students? For example, a student is researching gifted students and their subsequent ACT/SAT scores. Then: Would it be unethical for me to research ...
C. Smallwood's user avatar
6 votes
2 answers
304 views

What software do you use to keep up to date on literature, and if Google Scholar, how do you avoid information overload?

I see a lot of people use Google Scholar and ResearchGate alerts, but I find those alert systems too overwhelming to the point I get inundated and treat them like spam. Perhaps I'm not using them ...
elduderino260's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
393 views

Paper Suggestion/Recommendation Tools [closed]

To make literature search simpler and more efficient, I'm looking for a good tool that would come up with a list of publications based on a given set of publications/research areas. So far, I've found ...
V-Red's user avatar
  • 123
40 votes
6 answers
9k views

How can I express "I can't find any papers written about this"?

I'm an undergraduate writing a paper for a philosophy course in logic. My paper is exploring a relationship between Leibniz' logic and graph theory. In writing the paper, I've found some material in ...
Patrick Collins's user avatar
18 votes
1 answer
4k views

How to search for one phrase in the title and a different phrase in the body of the paper in a single Google Scholar search?

Google Scholar is a very good source of knowledge especially with its advanced search, but the options in the advanced search is either search in the title or in the whole paper. How can I search for ...
Elmahy's user avatar
  • 818
14 votes
3 answers
30k views

How to find out who funded a study / research?

It has been proven that the source of funding can have an influence on the results of a research (funding bias, well documented here and here). When we check for pieces of research, for example ...
lapin's user avatar
  • 241
12 votes
4 answers
4k views

Alternative to google scholar in China

Are there any valid alternatives to google scholar? I am currently living in China. almost the whole internet is blocked, including Google. I tried to bypass the firewall, then google scholar tends ...
gastro's user avatar
  • 863
11 votes
7 answers
3k views

List of citation graph browsers?

What are good ways to explore/discover literature visually, e.g. a visual interface for Google Scholar? There are a few tools to explore the citation graph ("which papers cite which papers"). Some are ...
root's user avatar
  • 319
10 votes
1 answer
809 views

How do I pick good keywords for literature alerts?

F'x has made a very informative post here about staying up to date with current research. My question concerns the "publication alert" part of it. To be clear: I am asking about setting up an online ...
Superbest's user avatar
  • 8,185
8 votes
2 answers
391 views

Efficient method to receive alerts for new publications

I am currently using Google Scholar to receive alerts (emails) for new publications in my field. However, to my understanding (I might be wrong) Google Scholar doesn't allow to: Use regular ...
Remi.b's user avatar
  • 291
8 votes
1 answer
851 views

How to 'stay up to date' in your field?

In academia, it's important to stay up to date with the latest 'hot' hypotheses in the your field. By 'hot', I mean the hypothesis that are most important/topical/relevant/popular. Perhaps the best ...
luciano's user avatar
  • 1,973
8 votes
2 answers
9k views

Why is my published article seemingly not indexed by Google or Google Scholar?

I am a Masters student, in the Faculty of Science in Canada. I have a question to ask regarding literature review. I am doing a bit of studying to find protocols for my experiment (where I hope to ...
Somdeb's user avatar
  • 83
8 votes
4 answers
1k views

Search techniques for finding references at the start of reviewing the literature for your research?

Whenever we start new research, we need to do a literature review first in order to both get acquainted with the context and the concepts related to our research as well as to situate our research ...
Anafandon's user avatar
  • 101
7 votes
2 answers
489 views

Resources of APIs for automated paper citation aggregation

I'm looking to do an extensive literature search. I would like to start with about half a dozen or so survey papers in the field, and look at their bibliography. Then, I would like to go through each ...
Ozzah's user avatar
  • 173
6 votes
2 answers
369 views

Meta-analysis using Google Scholar - are all years equally complete?

Like so many others, I scrape data from Google Scholar as a part of my lit review process, so that I can have a structured data set for meta-analysis of the literature. I noticed that for a couple of ...
Hack-R's user avatar
  • 1,287
5 votes
2 answers
375 views

Can you do an AND on Google Scholar alerts?

In Google Scholar, you can create an alert, such as "neural networks", which will inform you any time there is an article related to "neural networks". However, suppose I am interested in neural ...
Karnivaurus's user avatar
  • 1,425
5 votes
1 answer
449 views

Literature review and authorship

Let's say a research assistant has provided help on conducting a literature review and that some of the references are eventually used in a published paper. Would the research assistant normally get ...
curious's user avatar
  • 1,020
5 votes
2 answers
4k views

Where can I search for researchers in a specific field by location

Where can I search for some authors of publications or researchers in a specific filed (e.g. Computer science) and in a specific country (USA, China, ...) For example I would like to find all people ...
Ahmad's user avatar
  • 1,407
4 votes
3 answers
454 views

Should I pursue a research area even after finding that papers have already been written on it?

I am an undergraduate and I have no experience in research papers. I have come up with an idea to write a simple research paper on "Emerging fiber optic networks in Africa." To my utter astonishment, ...
user18044's user avatar
3 votes
3 answers
420 views

Following literature - What is a good configurable publication notifier?

I would like to keep up to date with public literature in my research field. All relevant publications are of too big a volume to follow and so the problem invites some automatic mechanism of ...
Ohad Dan's user avatar
  • 312
2 votes
1 answer
719 views

Searching for specific characters in publication titles

Is there any way to search for articles that include a specific character in their name? For instance, suppose you want to find articles that include $, £ or € in their title. When I have tried to ...
Phil's user avatar
  • 605
2 votes
4 answers
5k views

How to identify top researchers and landmark papers in a field? [closed]

I am currently a student doing research in Neuroscience, and as you can imagine it is a pretty big field. I am trying to better familiarize myself with my own subfield and other fields such stem cell ...
Phil D's user avatar
  • 61
2 votes
3 answers
173 views

Tool that suggests references based on a given bibliography [closed]

I'd like to have a tool (software or website) that helps me in doing literature surveys. Here's how I pictured that tool in my mind. Let's suppose that I've found myself a few relevant papers. As soon ...
Roberto Belotti's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
198 views

Exploring something completely new, even silly. [duplicate]

As it were, I finally dreamed up a direction to explore and write something about, but just like every other time, I noticed someone senior has written has already explored the line of thought. In ...
user avatar
-1 votes
2 answers
6k views

Google Scholar: how to exclude some countries from the search?

I use the google scholar alert system which sends me new studies made on a specific saved search. I'm looking for a way to exclude research conducted in some countries (or to only include some ...
JinSnow's user avatar
  • 141
-4 votes
4 answers
2k views

How Far To Chase The Paper?

Because I have autism I am forced to go it alone for writing a computer science research paper outside of conventional US university auspices toward a doctorate by publication through an accredited UK ...
eternalsquire's user avatar