Siirry pääsisältöön

Guide for Nanjing Institute of Technology (NJIT) students: Improving search results

Database search result analysis tools (such as "analyze results" and "refine results") help evaluate the result set by sorting or organising results according to various criteria. They allow you to narrow down the results based on factors such as publication date, language, publication type, or academic discipline.

A database is a collection of records in which information about each document is stored. Each record is composed of fields containing specific piece of that information. The fields, their names and searchability are database specific.  When you are searching, consider where your terms might be found. A search can be narrowed down by focusing it on the different fields of the record.

Common fields to focus a search on are:

  • Article title
  • Abstract
  • Key words
  • Full text

Often databases provide a default combination of for example title, abstract and keyword fields. You can choose the search field on drop down menu or use field codes in command search.

 

An example of a record. You can open the record by clicking the title in the search result list. When you are searching information about a specific topic, the relevant fields are usually the title, abstract and the keywords. Which fields in this example contain the word glycerol?  Scopus 27.7.2018

Citation pearl growing strategy

With a citation pearl growing strategy, the starting point is one relevant document. The idea of this search is to find more documents similar to the one already found

  • More recent literature than the core article can be found by searching the database for those documents that cite the core document (citing documents, cited by, times cited).
  • Literature published prior to the core document can be found by studying the reference list (cited references) of the article.
  • New searches can be made with new search terms found in the core document. When looking for new search terms in the core document, it is worth taking a careful look particularly at the title, abstract and the key words used there.
  • New searches can be made with the authors' names.

Reference lists and citation databases

The reference list (bibliography) is a list containing all the references that has been cited in the text.

In citation databases the items in reference list are linked to the article references, enabling a user to see a list of publications that have cited a chosen publication.

Using referencing and citation information a researcher can keep track of the attention received by their own articles or those of competitors, keep track of the development and impact of research results or scientific theories, and establish who are the most significant researchers in their field.

Reference information received from one reference database is never complete because it contains only references from articles published by journals indexed in that database.