Finding scientific information

Publishing a book is considerably slower than publishing in a journal. A scientific book is usually published only after the topic has been extensively researched and the information is well established.

Publishing research findings in books is more common in the humanities and educational sciences than in fields such as engineering, natural sciences, and medicine, where results are primarily published as international journal articles. Economics falls somewhere in between.

An edited book (also known as an anthology or collected work) consists of book chapters, sections or articles written by different authors. The editor compiles the chapters around a common theme to form a book. The book is marked as Edited (ed.), Toimitettu (toim.), Herausgegeben (hrsg.), or Redigerad (red.), depending on the language.

A monograph or an authored book is a standalone work written entirely by the same author or group of authors. It may be divided into chapters.

Doctoral theses (dissertations) undergo a preliminary review and a public defence, and can therefore be used as sources. The component publications of a dissertation (known as article-based, compilation, or bundled dissertations) are published in peer-reviewed journals.

An encyclopaedia is an extensive compilation of information. It may be general, containing information about a large amount of different topics, or it may focus on a particular subject matter such as medicine or engineering. Articles in encyclopaedias may vary in length from a few sentences to several pages, depending on the encyclopaedia.

A dictionary is a kind of reference work that presents words chosen according to some particular criteria. In monolingual dictionaries, explanations are given for the words; other dictionaries offer foreign language equivalents of the words.

A handbook is a kind of reference work that presents central information from a particular subject field. Handbooks are useful sources of factual information, which provide help in solving practical problems. They may contain for instance tables, constants and standards, and often they offer references to other sources of information.

A table is a numerical or other such presentation of information in a list format, usually using several columns (e.g. mathematical tables, physics and chemistry tables, statistics).

A scientific book or book chapter intended for an academic audience always includes a list of references. Books can also be peer-reviewed, but databases do not offer tools for verifying this, and such information is often not available on the publisher’s website or in the book itself. When evaluating books and book chapters, it is advisable to consider the author’s background and the reputation of the publisher. A list of reliable academic publishers can be found in the JUFO portal.

Book reviews give insight into what other scientists think of the book. They may be brief summaries or long scholarly evaluations and are often published in journals of the same field as the book being reviewed. In databases book reviews can be searched by the book title and filtering results by an appropriate document type (e.g. book review). For example, try searching international e-materials in Oula-Finna.

It can also be helpful to check whether the book has been cited in other publications. If citation data for the book or book chapter is not available in citation indexes or Google Scholar, you can try searching full-text databases using the book title as a keyword within the full text. This can reveal whether the book appears in the reference lists of peer-reviewed journal articles.

Information on the availability of books acquired by the University of Oulu Library can be found in the Oula-Finna database. Each book record includes publication details, location, and availability status. For printed books, the shelf location is linked to a library floor map. If a book is on loan, a reservation can be placed. For electronic books, a link is provided that directs users to the relevant e-book database. Many e-book databases also allow users to search within the full content of the books.

The interlibrary loan service searches and orders publications for loan and copies of publications (paid service). You can also ask the library to acquire books by using the Book suggestion form.