Library research skill

In my previous post, I mentioned about library research skills is one of the compulsory programmes I have to take part as a postgraduate at Glasgow University. Frankly say, I benefit and learnt a lot from here, filled in knowledge gap I don’t have during my undergraduate studies.

Skills I learnt in this course were proper way to search for journal by using academic database. Evaluate a good journal base on impact factor, citation index, apply Boolean operator like AND, OR, NOT to refine search target, subscribe to article alert, so that we can always update with all the recent published paper which are related to our field of study.

In contrast to my undergraduate life, I always use **google scholar or more advance by science direct. Anyway, this is not the only way, instead we can use academic database like medline, etc. to refine our search, look for paer really for academic purpose, rather than “commercial” paper. What I mean here is some companies might hire researchers to work for them. Therefore, this is always a good idea that we can read/refer article that solely for academic purpose, can give us a fair judgement, and definitely not aligned to certain party.

**I not intend to comment about usefulness of these services, instead with reference to academic database, and then we can have another alternative way to look for scientific literatures.


Besides, I also learnt some features offered by these databases, i.e. refine/ narrow down our search results. For instant, I wish to locate literatures about crop improvement; I can limit the search engine to locate articles which were published in certain period, e.g. last 10 years, or types of paper (review, short communication, journals, publishers, etc.). also, by applying Boolean operator, we can save a lot of time, as we don’t have to look for noon-related
paper.

Some new thing I learnt was looking at the quality of a paper based on “impact factor” & “citation index”. Impact factor refer to the influence of that particular journal, e.g. nature & science have considerably high impact factors. Meanwhile, citation index refers to how many people cite this particular paper.

Furthermore, we can subscribe to paper alert by email notification or RSS feed, so we can keep update with latest development and discovery in our field of study. This especially important for PhD student, because they have to ensure their literature review always follow the trend with recent development.

Interestingly, impact factor and citation index also become a common criteria for institution to recruit PhD, post-doc or academic/research staff as well as grant application. So, we should publish quality paper rather than simply publish large volume of paper. I was wondering if I can publish my paper in nature or science, with the fast pace like I published my posts in blog..Then that time I don’t worry about future career already, haha.

Anyway, recent publication in science by Simon (2008) stated about misused of impact factor by some people. Simply because, these black sheep of scientific community do so in order to get advancement in their career.

This training definitely helps me a lot. Unlike my undergraduate studies, when I carried the final year project or practical reports, I just simply searched and downloaded whatever full text available in the internet. These really time-consuming and “labour intensive”,,haha. Unfortunately, no body taught us last time, I think maybe this skill not suitable for undergraduate at the moment.

Anyway, my intention to write this post is to share some experiences I learnt from here, especially to my friends who are still involve in research and academic activites..hope this is helpful, cheers.


reference:

SIMONS, K. (2008) The misused impact factor. Science, 322, 165.