Introduction to literature search

Essays in physiology usually mean an exciting discovery for students in fields which are not yet dealt with in standard manuals. In many cases they require extensive search of literature, good command of languages, and enjoyable cooperation.

The topic for a thesis or a study for the Scientific Students’ Conference should also be one in which you are interested, which you like, thus which means an exciting challenge for you. While you will have to find something new for the physiology essays, when preparing a thesis, etc. you must have a complete review of the literature, history and state-of-the-art of the topic.

Already before selecting your topic it is worth to find out how difficult the topic is for you or your group. For some topics, there is very little literary background, ready knowledge: these require a lot of searching, making synthesis, and more “inventiveness” on behalf of the author. Other topics may be more laboursome, since there is a lot of material which has to be read, and systhematized.

Start your work in the library!

The Internet also offers a good possibility for checking if the topic is mentioned at all. Visit the library homepage which leads you to the collection of databases, and to the list of journals subscribed by the library. Click on the database links and “test” the databases by writing one or two terms.

After you have selected the topic

After you have selected the topic, you should by all means start your search with bibliographic databases.

You may ask: why not on the Internet, as you have already found a lot of websites dealing with the topic?

The Internet is really an almost infinite store of knowledge, and even some of our bibliographic databases also come through the world wide web. Why are bibliographic databases still superior?

1. Internet documents, the content and reliability of web pages are NOT CONTROLLED BY ANYONE! They might be useful for gaining information, but they are not sufficient for drawing scientific conclusions. Meanwhile, databases contain books, journal articles, conference materials, patents, reports, institutions’ publications, etc. which are assessed, corrected (peer reviewed) by experts and editorial boards. This means that these documents are likely to contain professionally correct material.
2. The several billion web pages “covered” and searched by popular search engines only cover the so-called surface web and usually this does not include professional databases, journals, etc. which belong to the invisible or deep web.
3. The search results of search engines are also ambiguous: their coverage of the sources on the Internet is not clear. It depends on the search engines how they order the thousands of hits (and it is not sure that the best ones will be among the first ones). The content of the bibliographic databases may be defined more clearly: we know which documents from which period are included. We may hope, that a good, targeted search will really retrieve the best publications.

We do not have to forget the vast array of Internet resources altogether, however – knowing the above – we have to be critical in the assessment of homepages.

The databases enumerated on the library’s homepage are not all equally useful when searching for a topic. We have to select the proper database.

Our criteria may be:

• what subject fields, disciplines are covered?
• what kind of documents are covered?
• what period of time is covered?
• does it lead to the full text of documents (or at least some of them)?
• is it possible to search the database from home or only from the library (campus)?

All these questions are answered in the list of special (veterinary, medical, agricultural, biology) and general databases. The latter are usually interdisciplinary databases which are interesting for us only partly.

For the purposes of physiology essays usually the CAB Abstracts, PubMed, Biological Abstracts, Zoological Record, Web of Science and the Science Direct databases offer the greatest help. Only PubMed is accessible from anywhere.

If we try to find some information either in a database, or by a search engine on the Internet, we have to be aware of the rules of searching which may be slightly different from database to database, from search engine to search engine, from interfact to interfact. The aim of search programmes is to ensure that the search results satisfy our needs. In order to achieve this the programmes handling databases:

1. enhance the selection of proper search terms by (indexes, thesauri),
2. make it possible to search for term fragments as well,
3. make it possible to combine search terms by (logical -Boolean- and proximity) operators,
4. make the limitation of the hits possible (for language, period, etc.),
5. make it possible to “export” (save, print, e-mail) the results (hits).

Most of the Internet search engines are also capable of most of the above functions. However, the standardization of the search terms is not possible, and as a matter of fact, hits may not be saved in the same way.

The following table summarizes how the suggested databases function and what symbols are used in them.

Database		Truncation/ widecards	AND	OR	NOT	Proximity	Limits	Help
CAB Abstracts		? #	AND	OR	NOT	N5 like near W8 like within	for any field	EbscoHost User Guide
PubMed		*/?	AND	OR	NOT	“”	Limits (language, time, gender, animal, etc.)	PubMed Basics
Web of Science		?,$	AND	OR	NOT	“”, same	Refine…	WOS
Science Direct		*,?	AND	OR	NOT	“”,” W/nn, PRE	Time, type of doc, etc.	SD Help
Library catalogue		*	AND	OR	NOT	“”	fields+conditions	Help
Google		automatic	space	OR	NOT	“”	Speciális keresés	Advanced Search Tips

Advanced Search tips

It is possible to save (Export, Save, Download, Send to file) the results (hit sets), as well as to print or e-mail them quite simply. Do not forget the records you need and set which data (fields) you need!

Note: In order to find documents you always need the author, title, and the year of the publication in the case of books, and in the case of journal articles the data of the journal (title, year, volume, issue, pages) which may be found in the Source field.

It is also possible to improve the effectiveness of Internet search. Do not forget about critical approach!

3. How to acquire original documents?

4. How to cite the literature used?

The identification of your source is the most important. You have to cite the sources because of the requirements of copy right, and the ethical requirement to make it clear which thoughts come from other authors, and which are yours in your paper. (Of course, you have to make correct citations also because your tutor has an overview of the literature as well.)

• References may be put at the bottom of pages into footnotes, or at the end of the paper.
• There are two ways of connecting the text with the references:You have to cite Internet sources as well! The necessary data (if you can find out): author, title, publishing organisation, URL (http…), the document’s date of publication on the Internet/date of amendment/date of reading.
  • put the name of the author and the year of publication into brackets after the quotation or hint (e.g. Abc, 2000), in which case the list of references will be ordered alphabetically according to author names,
  • continuous numbering ((1) or 1 (in upper index)), in which case the list will contain references ordered numerically.
• The most important requirement with regard to the list of references is identification and consistency. The necessary data and the punctuation suggested may be found in the guide to thesis writing.