Literature search and your personal literature database

Literature search is an important task whatever academic work you do. And citing references is a norm for any academic reports. Today, we are going to learn about Web of Science (part of ISI Web of Knowledge) and RefWorks, which are freely available to the University community, thanks to our Library.

Web of Science
Since we are using the Library subscription, first go to BioMedical Library site (http://www.biomed.lib.umn.edu/). Follow the link to Science Citation Index under ARTICLES/MORE. If you need an instruction, click User Guide button. Otherwise, Enter Here.

GENERAL SEARCH: You can search literature by TOPIC, AUTHOR, GROUP AUTHOR, SOURCE TITLE, PUBLICATION YEAR, and ADDRESS.

You click the boxes for the records you are interested and output the records. This output can be inputted into your personal literature database (see below). You can see the FULL RECORD for each entry by clicking the title.

You can look up the references cited in this paper (Cited References) and the papers that cite this paper as a reference (Times Cited). The latter helps to track what has happened since the publication of this paper. FIND RELATED RECORDS is a powerful function. It finds related records by the number of shared references. If the University Library has a subscription, you can see the full text of the paper by clicking Find It. You can also CREATE CITATION ALERT to track future publication related to this paper. Note that Web of Science covers books in addition to journal papers. CITED REFERENCE SEARCH: You can search for literature that cites particular CITED AUTHOR, CITED WORK, CITED YEAR(S). ADVANCED SEARCH: More specific query can be constructed by selecting Fields and combining them with Boolean operators. You can also combine various search results you have got. Anyway, to use the selected literature in RefWorks, output them as a Field Tagged text file.

RefWorks
You can make your personal literature database with selected records using RefWorks. Since we use RefWorks through the Library subscription, go to the University Library site (http://www.lib.umn.edu/). Among the quick links on the left, follow the link to RefWorks. If you are a first timer, go to Set up a new RefWorks Account to register user name and password. Otherwise, RefWorks Login. You can find a tutorial at http://refworks.com/tutorial/. You can import reference list, such as ones output from Web of Science. The simplest way is copy and paste from the field tagged text file.

You can also search online databases, such as PubMed, from RefWorks. But I dont know if we can use Web of Science directly from RefWorks. You can organize your database using folders e.g., each folder for different paper you write. You can search and edit the records. You can import/export the records between RefWorks and other commercial reference managing software, such as EndNote. Write-N-Cite You need Write-N-Cite software installed in your computer.

Once you cite records, you can format the bibliography for a particular journal.

You can use Web of Science and RefWorks through the library sites from outside the Universitys network, via x500 log-in. This is a good thing about internet-based

database service you can work on it wherever internet access is. A bad thing is that if internet or their server is down, you cant work on it. When you go away from the University, you may not be going to have an access to Web of Science and RefWorks anymore. Then what do you do? Literature Search: PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed) hosted by National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/): Molecular-oriented biology, especially biomedical-related literature. AGRICOLA (http://agricola.nal.usda.gov/): agriculture, plant-related. Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/): You can look up papers that cite a particular paper. At this point, full texts of only limited journal papers are immediately available without subscription. But NIH is pushing to have the full texts of the papers describing NIHfunded research freely available to public within 6 months after publication. So, this situation could change in near future. Personal literature database: I dont know a good solution to this, other than you purchase reference managing software, like EndNote. In this case, remember to export your literature database on RefWorks in a format EndNote can import (field tagged text format) and save it before you go away. Although we are not getting into these, automatically extracting information from literature and making machine-friendly literature databases are important current topics in bioinformatics.