1. Exploiting information: getting the
most from the OU Library
Nicola Dowson and Wendy Mears
21 March 2012

2. Our session will cover..
• Literature review and sources of help
• Keeping up to date
• Bibliographic management tools

3. A good literature review will..
• clarify your understanding of the field
• explain the rationale for your research
• place your research within a broader context
• evaluate the results of previous research
• define key concepts and ideas
• identify research in related areas that are generalisable
or transferable to your topic
• identify relevant methodological issues.
• (taken from Uni New England library website:
• http://www.une.edu.au/library/eskillsplus/literature/litreview.php

4. Lit review - doing it well
• Comprehensive searching
• Citation searching
• Good record keeping

5. Help and training resources
• Information skills for researchers on Library website
• Training sessions, online or F2F
• Subject specialists within the Library
• Immediate help via Library helpdesk

6. Keeping up to date
• Introducing you to ways of keeping up-to-date
using electronic tools

7. Email alerts, RSS feeds and tracking
engines allow you to:
• Set up, save and re-run your searches against latest
additions to databases
• Set up profiles to receive automatically the contents
pages of journal issues
• Receive notification of articles recently published and
added to a database
• Keep up to date with breaking news
• Discover new resources in your field

8. Email alerting services
• Two types
– Journal table of contents(TOC) based
– Search based: keywords, authors, subject
• Examples
– Zetoc Alert
– TicTOCs: http://www.tictocs.ac.uk
– IEEE Explore

9. Zetoc
• Zetoc provides access to the
British Libraries Electronic Table
of Contents of around 20,000
current journals and around 16,000
conference proceedings published
per year

10. Other updating tools (1)
• Setting up RSS feeds
– iGoogle: http://.google.com/ig
– Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/
– Netvibes: http://www.netvibes.com
• Social networking tools
– ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net

11. Other updating tools (2)
• Social bookmarking
– Diigo: http://www.diigo.com
• Social citation sharing
– Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com
• Tracking website changes
– TrackEngine:
http:www.trackengine.com/servlets/com.nexlabs.trac

12. Bibliographic management
tools