Finding information in the Library and online

CBT Diploma

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Introduction

There are lots of ways to search for academic information. You may have been given specific book or journal references to follow up or you might want to search for new information yourself. This workbook takes you through the various ways you can use the resources at the University of Birmingham to find information. It covers:

The basics: what’s on the portal? Using the library catalogue eLibrary: finding journals and resources Using QuickSearch – quick literature searching Using Web of Science and PsycINFO – more advanced literature searching

Watch this video from Library Services. It outlines the range of facilities, resources and services that we offer to assist you with your learning and research: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgUCWZbfQR4

Library Services on the portal

Under the my.library tab you’ll find your one stop shop for all things library related. You can get to the catalogue, reading lists, and eLibrary here, find out about opening hours, use the Just Ask! Instant messenger, place an interlibrary loan request, or use the GoFindIt (Online Library Resources look-up) tool. We’re going to look at each section of this screen in turn

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Just Ask! and other support

Lots of help is available to you on the portal. The Just Ask! service allows you to connect with a librarian immediately to ask any questions you may have. This service is also smartphone friendly. Subject specific support is also available—you can find contact details for your Subject Advisor here as well as links to various kinds of training offered and guides on using library resources, database guides, referencing guides, and so on.

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Finding stuff on the catalogue

Next to the Just Ask! facility, you’ll see a link to our library catalogue (http://libcat.bham.ac.uk). This is where you can find out see what we have in stock and where it’s located. You can do keyword, title or author searches or a combination of the above. In the image below, you can see a search a keyword search for ‘cognitive behaviour therapy’.

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This search brings up 34 results (correct as of 5/12/2011). These results include a mixture of printed and electronic resources. Print resources will have a classmark, whilst electronic resources have a Connect button underneath them.

Classmark = print

Connect = electronic

Accessing printed books and journals Click on the blue hyperlinked title to find out more about printed book you wish to borrow. This will give you the full bibliographic record, including where the book is held and how long it can be borrowed for. For example, in this case we have four week loan copies all of which are held in the Barnes Library in the Medical School.

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For more information on loan types, borrowing rights and renewals. See: http://www.library.bham.ac.uk/using/borrowing/index.shtml. Don’t forget! You can use any of the libraries on campus: http://www.library.bham.ac.uk/using/libraries/.

To access an eBook: eBooks are a useful means of accessing information as they don’t require you to enter the physical library and they allow multiple users to access them at the same time, i.e. no one can ‘borrow’ it before you get to it! Just click on the Connect button and you should see the following message:

Click OK. You will probably be prompted to enter your University username and password especially if you’re off campus. Enter these details and you should gain access to the eBook. If you have any problems using eBooks, please see our help pages: http://www.library.bham.ac.uk/searching/electronic/ebooks.shtml

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Using eLibrary

eLibrary is our gateway to all of the thousands of electronic resources that we subscribe to including eJournals, eBooks, bibliographic databases, encyclopaedias, and so on. When you click on the link, you will need to log-in using your University username and password. This authenticates you as a genuine University of Birmingham user and allows you access to our paid resources.

eLibrary can be accessed 24/7, on and off campus.

Find eJournal/eBook This is the screen you land on when you first enter eLibrary. You can use this screen when you need to find a specific journal article or want to browse a particular title.

Top Tip Most of our eJournals are electronically available via eLibrary although a few are held in print. It’s best to start looking for journals using eLibrary and then check for a print copy if we don’t have e-access.

For online demonstrations of how to use eLibrary, see http://www.elibrary.bham.ac.uk/guide.shtml#demo.

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When you click GO, eLibrary will retrieve a list of eJournals matching your search terms. For many titles, you will see multiple links. These are just the different publishers and providers from whom we get access. Their webpages will all vary slightly. The main thing to note is the available from information underneath each link. This tells you which years you can gain access to from each publisher. You can click on any link to go through to that publisher’s homepage and click through to individual issues. Or, if you have the exact citation data, you can use FindIt!@Bham to go directly to the article you’re interested in.

For example, I’m interested in the following article: Fairburn, C.G., Cooper, Z. and Shafran, R. (2002) Cognitive behaviour therapy for eating disorders: a “transdiagnostic” theory and treatment. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 41 (5): 509-528. Firstly, I search for the journal title on eLibrary. You can select either starts with, contains or exact depending on how much of the title you know.

3. Click here

1. Type your title here

2. Select a button for one of these

options

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When you click on FindIt!@Bham, a services menu appears. Enter the year, volume, issue and start page of the article you want in the boxes. In this case, you can choose either the first or last option, as these both give access to 2002 articles.

Then click GO. This will take you to the abstract of the article. From here you can click on the link to Full text or PDF (the exact link will differ according to publisher / provider). Once you have the PDF, you can save or print it.

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Find Resource This is the section of eLibrary that houses our bibliographic databases, subject gateways and other useful electronic resources. To access these, simply click on Find Resource in the blue banner at the top of the screen. To get a feel for what we have, try browsing by Subject.

Select a Subject

Select a sub-category

Click here

Bibliographic databases such as PsycINFO, MEDLINE and Web of Science help you search for research articles and information in a systematic way.

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QuickSearch QuickSearch allows you to search across a range of databases without having to worry about how they actually work. Select QuickSearch from the blue banner in eLibrary

By selecting a QuickSet, you are defining which databases you’d like QuickSearch to search for you. Health and Biomedical Sciences contains the main databases in this area, whilst SuperSearch is a fast search across all subject areas. Click the hyperlink for each set to see which databases it searches. The button next to each database will tell you what subjects each covers.

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Enter your search terms into the box and click GO and watch as it retrieves results. QuickSearch will retrieve the first 30 hits from each database, although you can hit the retrieve more button to see more results. QuickSearch will give you the results it finds, what database it found them from, and a FindIt!@Bham button to link out to full text.

NB. This search is not systematic or sophisticated, but it does give you scholarly results very quickly! If you click the summary button above the results, you can see exactly how many results have been retrieved from each database. This will give you some clues as to which database you can most usefully interrogate for more systematic searching.

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GoFindIt! Online Library resources look-up tool You will also see a version of QuickSearch available to you in the my.library tab of the student portal. This defaults to SuperSearch but notice that you change to any other QuickSet using the dropdown menu. Tick the box to log-in to eLibrary first if you wish to see the full text of results. Notice that you can also search other electronic and printed material using this tool by selecting the correct tab.

If you want to do a more detailed or systematic search, you’ll need to actually go in to the databases. If you’re not sure about how to construct a search, have a look at our guide Effective Search Techniques http://www.library.bham.ac.uk/searching/guides/sk10effectivesearching.pdf. For full details on using all of our databases, see our guide pages: http://www.library.bham.ac.uk/searching/guides/databaseguides.shtml

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Literature searching: using the databases

An important part of the academic process is searching the literature to find current and older research to inform your ideas and back up your arguments. The most efficient way of searching the literature is to use a good quality ‘bibliographic database’. Examples of these include:

PsycINFO Web of Science CINAHL (Nursing and Allied Health) ASSIA (Applied Social Sciences Indexes and Abstracts) Sociological Abstracts

The sooner you start using these, the better your assignments will be, and the more confidently and efficiently you search them, and the more time you will save! To find any of these database go to eLibrary > Find Resource and type in the resource name. We’re going to look at PsycINFO and Web of Science. NB. You will also have a training session on using these resources. What follows is to help you get started.

Web of Science

Go to eLibrary > Find Resource and type in Web of Science. You’ll see that you can select an individual index (e.g. Science or Social Sciences) but we’re going to select the main Web of Science (ISI) link.

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On the main search screen, you have a number of search options:

The default search screen allows you to search by topic, author and publication name but you can change these using the drop-down menus. You can also add more search boxes by clicking on Add another field. Further down the screen, you can select the date range you wish to search and specify which indexes (Citation Databases) you are interested in—I recommend keeping all of them ticked except for Arts and Humanities Citation Index. In this example, I’ve changed the date range to 2001 to 2011.

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You can carry out a subject search here by entering keywords like so:

The quotation marks tell the database to search for a phrase, i.e. to look for these words together and in this particular order. The asterisk (*) acts as a truncation symbol or wildcard. This tells the database I want it to look for alternative word endings including singular/plural and US/UK variations. In this example, I am telling the database I want it to retrieve articles that contain: either substance(s) misuse or substance(s) use AND CBT or cognitive behavior therapy or cognitive behaviour therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy. Once you have entered your terms, hit the search button and your results will be displayed.

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From here you can:

Refine your results by subject category, document type, language, institution or country using the limits in the blue box on the left hand side of the screen.

Click on FindIt@Bham to see if we have full text electronic access. Don’t

forget! Remember that not all journals are available electronically or we may only subscribe to the print version. Also note, that we do not subscribe to all the journals listed on Web of Science. If the journal is only available in print format you will be given an option to link through to the Library Catalogue at the University of Birmingham. If the journal article is not available via the University’s printed or online collections and is very important to you, you will need to try another library or use InterLibrary Loans http://www.library.bham.ac.uk/using/borrowing/interlibraryloans.shtml

Click on the blue hyperlink to see the abstract and see what keywords are used. These can help me identify other search terms to use.

Click here to see citing articles

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Click on the Times Cited link. The number next to this shows me how many times the article has been cited in other articles indexed in Web of Science. Clicking on this lets me see those articles. I can then look at their abstracts and keywords and click on FindIt!@Bham, allowing me to build up a picture of how the original article I searched for is being used.

Print, email or save your results to reference management software like

RefWorks. For guidance on referencing, see our i-cite guide http://www.i-cite.bham.ac.uk

PsycINFO

PsycInfo is an important database for Psychology, available on the Ovid interface. It has a range of search functions allowing you to undertake a very precise search. Go to eLibrary > Find Resource and search for PsycINFO. Click on the link and on the page that appears scroll down until you find PsycINFO 1987 – [Present]. This will take you to the main search page. The default is for keyword searching but this can be changed by selecting one of the other search icons.

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Unlike Web of Science, PsycINFO uses MeSH subject headings – a controlled vocabulary of predetermined terms to help you search. We’re going to try searching for substance misuse and CBT. Click into the search box and type in the first search term: CBT. Make sure that Map Term to Subject Heading is ticked so that PsycINFO will try and match your search term to its index of terms. This is like Google’s ‘Did you mean…?’ facility. In this case, you should see:

If you need to, you can click on the ‘i’ to find out what each term means. Select the tick box to the left of Cognitive behavior therapy. You can also tick the box underneath Auto Explode to include all narrower subheadings. Then click Continue. The search history box now shows the result of your search, with the number of references that have been indexed with this term.

I can now repeat this process using my term ‘substance misuse’. In this case, PsycINFO suggests a range of suitable MeSH headings including Drug Abuse, Alcohol Abuse, and Inhalant Abuse. I can select as many or as few of these as I want. When I click continue, these results will also appear in my search history.

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Tick the boxes next to each of your results and click on Combine Selections with AND. This will combine your results to retrieve only articles containing both of your search terms. This retrieves 405 results (correct as of 5/12/2011) which can be found by scrolling down the page. You can apply further limits using the box below the search box. Avoid Full Text, but you may want to use Human, English or change the publication year. Have a look at the Additional Limits too.

As in Web of Science you can now do the following:

Click on FindIt!@Bham to check for electronic full-text access

Follow the Find Similar or Find Citing Articles links

Look at the Complete Reference to see what other MeSH headings have been used. This may help you develop your search.

You can also print or email your results, or save them to RefWorks.

And that’s it! There are lots of more advanced tips and tricks to using these databases, but this should get you started. Don’t be afraid to have a go and ask questions.

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Useful links

All the useful links in one place: Library Catalogue http://libcat.bham.ac.uk eLibrary www.elibrary.bham.ac.uk i-cite guide (for information on referencing and downloading and using RefWorks) www.i-cite.bham.ac.uk Database and subject guides http://www.library.bham.ac.uk/searching/guides/ My email address: s.l.pittaway@bham.ac.uk Feel free to email me if you want any more info or need any help on using the library and its resources! Sarah Pittaway Acting Subject Advisor for Psychology

Guide written by Sarah Pittaway. Format inspired by Ned Potter: http://thewikiman.org.

December 2011