Library Research Guides: Searching the literature: Searching for information

Selecting databases to search

Bond University Library provides access to full-text articles from over 22000 journals in hundreds of databases.

Find a database by subject:

The Library Research Guides provide recommended resources for your particular subject area
The Electronic Resources page provides a full list of the databases by subject area
Your Faculty Librarian can recommend databases relevant for your research topic

Find a database by name

Look for a particular database on the Electronic Resources page

To search for a particular journal. use the A-Z Journals List.

The quickest way to search for journal articles is to use Library Search (also available from the search box on the library homepage). Library Search searches over 50 of our databases simultaneously, but it does miss some key databases (PubMed/Medline, PsycInfo, legal databases etc.) so it should be used in conjunction with other databases. This video will show you how to search Library Search:

Developing your search strategy

Searching for a Literature Review
For a step by step approach to searching for a literature review, including how to identify your search words and modify and combine them to get the best results, see the document above. Remember that your Faculty Librarian can give you one on one assistance with searching for a literature review, including assistance with developing your search strategy, identifying and using appropriate databases, and anything else mentioned in this guide.

Tools for citation searching

When you find a key paper in your field of research you should look at its reference list for other relevant papers. You can also search for papers that have cited the key paper. There are 3 main sources of citation data that can be used for this purpose.

Web of Science
Produced by Thomson Reuters, Web of Science incorporates the Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. Historically it has been the most widely used tool for performing citation analyses.
Scopus
Produced by Elsevier, Scopus covers the sciences (life sciences, health sciences and physical sciences), social sciences and humanities. Scopus is the citation data supplier for the 2010 ERA Evaluation.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar also tracks citation data. It has better coverage in the arts and humanities than Web of Science or Scopus, but covers the sciences as well. Publish or Perish is software that extracts the citation data present in Google Scholar and produces a range of metrics, including the h-index and journal impact metrics. Produced by Professor Anne-Wil Harzing of the University of Melbourne. The Publish or Perish software is not supported by Library Services.

If you use this Bond ezproxied link instead of the standard URL, you will be able to see holdings information from Bond Library.

Searching for grey literature

Depending on your field of research, grey literature may be an important source. Grey literature means information sources which haven't been published commercially, including reports, conference papers and theses. The tools below are useful for finding grey literature.

Web searches. Many unpublished documents produced recently can be found on the web in pdf format. Using Google you can add filetype:pdf to the end of your search to find only pdf documents.

Theses. To find theses see the information on this page.

WorldCat
WorldCat lets you search the collections of over 20,000 libraries across the world. Unpublished documents held by a library might be found in this way.

Trove
Trove is similar to WorldCat, but focuses on Australian libraries and materials. You can limit your results to particular material types (eg. theses or conference papers), and use the Advanced Search to specify extra options such as a particular research institution.

To request an item located in the national database, but not held by Bond University Library, please use Citation Linker in Library Search.

OAIster
OAIster contains millions of records harvested from open archives across the world, such as Bond's open-access repository e-publications@bond. Journal articles, theses, research papers and other digital items are available.