With finals, presentations, and papers due, the end of the semester can be a particularly challenging time for students all over the world. An additional problem that adds stress to the already overwhelming workload is the need to find relevant literature for each assignment.
Finding papers from the specific author that your professor recommended, or searching about new articles that support your research hypotheses, the process of search for literature can go on for hours and hours. My own experience as a student has been one of constant frustration when it comes to finding relevant literature, not only because of the many hurdles presented by paywalls and other restrictions placed on digital publications, but also because of language barriers in fields where very specific topics need very specific research contexts.
During the last year, I have been actively using ScienceOpen for my research, and below I want to highlight some of the most useful tools that helped me in the past two semesters:
Over 84 million publications available
In the past year, I have witnessed ScienceOpen’s network expand from 73 to more than 84 million publications. The ScienceOpen network includes content covering a wide variety of subjects, simplifying research across disciplines, and facilitating the ability for students to find publications relevant to their context.
Different perspectives within academia, research traditions and geographic areas are represented in ScienceOpen’s network of featured publishers.
In our blog we usually feature topical-based blog posts, where we highlight important publishers in a specific disciplines, whose content can be accessed on ScienceOpen. Our blog is also promoting SDG-related content, which is quite relevant in academia today and expands across a wide range of disciplines. If your desired type of content isn’t featured in our blog yet, simply search for it on our search engine, and let the infrastructure of ScienceOpen do the rest.
Search and filter options
When you search for a discipline, research area, or simply a keyword in our search engine, thousands of publications will show up, and that can also be overwhelming. Our search and filter options allow you to narrow your search to relevant subtopics of keywords as well as sort the publications by date, citation count, or Altmetric score.
Our blog below explains in more detail the search functionalities of ScienceOpen. You simply need to register and try new things around.
New Advanced Search Functionalities! – ScienceOpen Blog
TIP: Abstracts help you find out faster if an article fits in your literature list or not. Although not all articles include an abstract, you can filter titles on our search engine by Record Completeness and choose only articles and publications that include an abstract. Try this out and save yourself some hours by simply reading the articles that are actually relevant to your research.Filtering only Open Access content
Paywalls are one of the biggest challenges for students. There is plenty of research available, but sometimes simply too expensive to access it.
You can narrow your search to open access only publications using the Open Access filter on ScienceOpen’s search engine, saving you valuable time, and keeping you away from unethical methods of accessing the desired publication. All open access publications indexed on our network have the open access symbol next to the title, and you can use all of the search functionalities on the list of open access articles, to get the most of our network.
TIP: Follow a collection. If you have found a researcher collection, a journal or book publisher which has various titles covering your study area, hit the follow button and get notifications everytime new content is added in the collection.Author Search
Your lecturer mentioned an author which can be relevant to your research? Add that name in our search engine and get a full list of titles from that author.
Our search engine offers a separate search function for authors, where you can sort by surname, publication count and relevance. ScienceOpen’s integration with ORCID, makes it easier to find the exact author you are looking for, by simply searching for the author’s ORCID ID.
Narrowing by keywords and smart search options
Research papers and final assignments many times need data from various disciplines, and it might be difficult to find the perfect data that supports your argument or research question, if this data is lost between keywords or missing abstracts.
When you search for a topic or a specific phrase on ScienceOpen, our search landing page features on the left offer different options to help you narrow down the search by collection, publisher, journal, or keyword.
By combining our various search filters, you can easily create your own search and adapt our search engine to the specificalities of your research.
TIP: Save your search! With our wide range of filters you can create a customized search which covers your exact research interests, save the search in your profile and gain real-time updates as new content is integrated into our platform.EXTRA TIP: Export Citation! Have you found the title you are looking for and want to include it in the reference list. Our Cite as button, automatically generates a reference for you, which you can easily copy in your paper, or export as BibTex, EndNote or RIS and add it to your referencing tool of choice.
Try it out now!
In this blog I simply described some of the features that helped me the most in my literature review process with the help of ScienceOpen. There are many other tools, which you can customize and tailor to your needs.
Have I missed something? Let me know by registering on ScienceOpen for free and trying the tools yourself. If there is something missing in this blog, get in touch with me at Kevin.Jasini@scienceopen.com and let’s help fellow students get the most out of their research on ScienceOpen.