Tips for literature search

• Scientific publication cycle
• Kinds of documents:
  • patents: government granted license to an invention
  • standards: agreed upon methodology: e.g. 802.11
  • journals: research results presented in a periodical/magazine
  • conference proceedings: research results presented at a meeting (most conferences in CS are peer-reviewed)
  • technical report: description of a solution to a specific problem
  • books
    • reference: encyclopedias, tables, data collections, properties
    • manuals: lab methods, programming languages, operating systems
    • monographs: general topics
  • technical specifications: how a device or component works, e.g. circuit diagrams
  • code library: database of source code listings or linkable subroutines
• Peer review: researchers validating each others work before publication
• Academic Integrity & Plagiarism web site
• If you are not sure how to get started on your project, come to Steacie

• RefWorks can help you manage your footnotes & bibliography on the web. Easy to use, interfaces directly with work to create footnotes & bibliographies. If logging in from home, you need to use RWYorku group code.
• Library Footnotes, Bibliographies, RefWorks page, Landmark Citation Machine.

• Need to use Passport York login or bar code number & PIN from library card to authenticate as a York user.
• Information here on logging in.
• Remember: need to type in name of eresource using “by title” link after logging in.

• Do a search in The York Catalogue:
  • by title: Concurrent programming in Java : design principles and patterns
  • by author: Bjarne Stroustrup
  • by journal title: journal of the acm
  • by subject: Java
  • by subject: concurrent programming, parallel programming, parallel processing
  • by keyword: concurrent and programming and java

• Google Books Search – search inside the books

These online databases can also be found in the eResources Quick Links or Search boxes on the library home page.

• INSPEC - best source for citations in all computing fields, best for comprehensive searches
  • concurrent and aerospace and programming
  • concurrent and locking and java
• Web of Science - very good coverage of all major computing journals, good for citation searches
  • concurrent and locking and java
• Scopus - both references and citations
• ACM Guide to Computing Literature - another one focusing on computing
• Very important: look in full text article databases for conference proceedings:
  • IEEE, ACM or Lecture Notes in Computer Science: look in DBs below
  • SPIE: keyword search in catalogue: SPIE and proceeding #
  • Other: keyword search with part of title
  • Last resort: 50-75% of conference papers usually on author's home pages

• ACM Digital Library - best resource: all ACM journals & proceedings
• IEEE Xplore - all IEEE journals & proceedings, more engineering than CS
• Lecture Notes in Computer Science - source of articles from various conference proceedings, find citations from Web of Science

• Safari - over 200 online computer/technical books on a wide range of subjects
• Books24x7 - 1000s of searchable full text books in computing and engineering
• Synthesis - amazing collection of CS & Engineering ebooks, more advanced topics

Use the Internet wisely.

• Using Google as a scholarly research tool:
  • example: concurrent programming
  • example: concurrent programming locking
  • example: concurrent programming locking algorithm
  • example: concurrent programming locking algorithm java
  • strategy: find good portal sites
  • strategy: make sure you know exactly who produced the content
• DBLP - good CS index of free web & many conferences & journals
• Citeseer - indexes the free web but a bit out of date
• Computing Research Repository (CoRR) - eprints and other online papers
• Collection of Computer Science bibliographies
• Google Scholar – good tool, but a bit unreliable while in Beta release. Generally quite good for CS, especially to find conference papers not in any of the databases we subscribe to.
• and others

Blog post version of this page.

• Office: Steacie 102H
• Email: jdupuis@yorku.ca
• MSN IM: john_dupuis@hotmail.com