Tips for literature search

For Starters

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;
York's Academic Integrity Tutorial web site;
If you are not sure how to get started on your project, come to the Steacie library.

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, Landmarks 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.

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.
Web of Science - very good coverage of all major computing journals, good for citation searches.
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 number.
- Other: keyword search with part of title.
- Last resort: 50-75% of conference papers usually on author's home pages (note, however, that this may not be the final version of the paper).

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 to which we subscribe.

Blog post version of this page.