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Tips for literature search

For Starters

General Information

  • 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 web site.
  • If you are not sure how to get started on your project, come to the Steacie library.

Free Citation Management Software

  • Zotero stores and organizes citations and associated PDFs in the cloud (300 MG of free space) and on your desktop. It automatically generates citations using plugins for most popular word processors. It can also export citations for use in BibTeX; visit this page about BibTeX and Zotero for more help.
  • Mendeley is similar to Zotero. It stores and organizes citations and associated PDFs in the cloud (2 GB of free space) and on your desktop. It automatically generates citations using plugins for most popular word processors. It can also export citations for use in BibTeX; visit this page about BibTeX and Mendeley for more help.

Logging in from Home

  • Need to use your Passport York login to authenticate from off-campus. You will be automatically prompted to log in as long as you access resources from the library website.

Finding Resources

Finding Books & Journals

  • 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 programming java

Finding Articles

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

Article Citation Databases

  • 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).

Full Text Article Databases

Online Computer Books

  • 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.

Using Resources on the Internet

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.
  • 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.

Librarian Contact Information

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literature.1420648500.txt.gz · Last modified: 2015/01/07 16:35 by jkvan