The ACM digital library is a collection of citations and full text from the Association of Computing Machinery journal and newsletter articles and conference proceedings. It currently contains 54000 online articles from 30 journals and 900 proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM digital library information guide
Friday, 18 September 2009
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Search Tips - too few results
When searching if you are getting only a few results remember to
- Check your search strategy - have you thought of all possible spellings, alternative words etc
- Broaden your search by omitting a search term
- Search further years back
- Select another database
Search Tips - Search strategy
Once you have identified the resources you think may be appropriate you should then analyse your topic and note down any keywords you can use in your search.
- Consider synonyms/realted terms - eg shoes, footwear
- Consider acronyms and abbreviations - eg EU/ European Union
- Conside different spellings - eg globalisation/globalization
- Combining search term using AND/OR/NOT
- Using truncation to find all forms of that word, for example manag* will retrieve results for all forms of the word such as manager,managment, managing etc
- Replacing one or more letters of a word with a wildcard (symbol) in order to retrieve all versions of that word, for example wom*n would find woman/women - this is useful for when american spellings
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
Search Tips - Locating different types of information
Once you have identified what type of information you are looking for you can select the appropiate database to search, some examples are
- Journal articles – Business Source Complete
- Market Reports – Mintel
- Company data – Mergent Online
- Newspapers – Proquest Newspapers (includes FT)
Search Tips - Identifying different types of information
To begin with, when doing research you may want to start with discovering the key resources in your topic and there is a large number of information sources to search from out there. I have broken them down into three main types. The Primary and secondary resources have increased level of detail and you can be led to these sources from the tertiary sources.
Primary sources consist of original information, written or produced by people directly involved in the research or events being presented or described. Examples include company reports, newspapers, letters, government documents, photographs and speeches. This type of material is important so that you can formulate your own opinions of events by examining first-hand material.
Secondary sources are a good place to start your research into a new topic and provide a useful source of suggestions for further reading on the topic. Examples include textbooks, journal articles, dictionaries, glossaries and reviews. This type of material is important so that you are aware of critical research that has been carried out on a topic already.
Tertiary sources allow you to do broad searches from which you can narrow down and pinpoint the key primary sources. For example you can use an Abstract index database to find articles written about a topic to give you an idea of key authors and then access the articles or books themselves.
So when starting a piece of work, its worth considering the type of information you want, i.e do you need statistical information from company reports, are you interested in the topical angle so you may want to look for newspaper articles etc. If you are not sure where to start you may want to first check the library catalogue to see what books are on that topic, or even your reading list.
Primary sources consist of original information, written or produced by people directly involved in the research or events being presented or described. Examples include company reports, newspapers, letters, government documents, photographs and speeches. This type of material is important so that you can formulate your own opinions of events by examining first-hand material.
Secondary sources are a good place to start your research into a new topic and provide a useful source of suggestions for further reading on the topic. Examples include textbooks, journal articles, dictionaries, glossaries and reviews. This type of material is important so that you are aware of critical research that has been carried out on a topic already.
Tertiary sources allow you to do broad searches from which you can narrow down and pinpoint the key primary sources. For example you can use an Abstract index database to find articles written about a topic to give you an idea of key authors and then access the articles or books themselves.
So when starting a piece of work, its worth considering the type of information you want, i.e do you need statistical information from company reports, are you interested in the topical angle so you may want to look for newspaper articles etc. If you are not sure where to start you may want to first check the library catalogue to see what books are on that topic, or even your reading list.
Search Tips - Finding a journal
Using the Library Catalogue to find journals
Select the Journal Search option and enter the journal title, which will bring back a list of search results. E-journals will appear in this list in upper case.
Click on location for details of the print journal
Click the SFX button
for accessing an ejournals. This will provide you with information as to which volumes are available and will give a link to the online journal.
Select the Journal Search option and enter the journal title, which will bring back a list of search results. E-journals will appear in this list in upper case.
Click on location for details of the print journal
Click the SFX button
for accessing an ejournals. This will provide you with information as to which volumes are available and will give a link to the online journal.
Search Tips - Finding a book
Library Catalogue - this is where you will be able to search for all our printed books, as well as our journals, e-books and e-journals.
Use the Quicksearch option on the library catalogue to find a book. Simply type in the authors surname and one or two words from the title
For books you can click on the location link to find the classmark, and for electronic material you can use the SFX link.
You can also use the library catalogue to renew your books and place holds on books which are currently out on loan. You will need to log in with your college card barcode and PIN to do this.
Online guide
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