Sources for literature research
Literature research is an important part of your thesis project and of scientific work in general.
At this page you’ll find directions to several on-line sources for scientific literature.
Library
First of all, there is the library of Utrecht University, which can be found at http://www.library.uu.nl/182main.html.
Two important entry points into the literature of the library are:
UBU, which provides you access to books, conference proceedings and printed journals
Full-text UBU, which provides you full text access to journals, newspapers, bibliographies, reference works and dissertations that can be downloaded instantly.
The university also provides access to the catalogues of the following institutions, which are relevant in the area of
computer and information science. In these catalogues you will mainly find articles that are produced in journals and
transactions and in conference proceedings supported by the institution.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Springerlink
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Other resources
Although the University provides access to a wide array of resources, you will not find everything there.
Therefore, we would also like to point you at the following on-line sources where additional literature can be found.
With Picarta, you can access the catalogues of all universities in the Netherlands.
If you find interesting literature there you can make reservations via the library. If you are interested in journals for which Utrecht University
does not have subscriptions you can search these journals via the website of the publisher, some well-known
publishers (but there are many more) are:
Elsevier
Wiley Interscience
Taylor & Francis
Emerald library
If you find interesting literature there you can make reservations via the
library. It can also
be useful to use the Table of Contents (ToC) alert service that are provided
by publishers. Once you subscribe to such a service, you will receive the Table
of Contents of new issues of journals that you selected by e-mail.
Search engines
Finally, there are search engines with a focus on scientific material. However, you should realize that these
search engines depend on the scientific material that is available via the Internet.
Citeseer (search results ranked on basis of citations)
Google Scholar
Scirus
DLPB Bibliography
If you find more useful on-line sources please let me know at remko@cs.uu.nl
so that we can publish them on this website.
Reference management
There are several tools available for managing your references:
- RefWorks (free license via UU)
- Zotero (free Firefox plugin)
- Papers ( Mac OS X tool)
- MS Word 2007 (has an integrated function for managing references)
A commonly used reference format is APA. Here you can find an explanation and some examples of this reference format. Other widely used formats are IEEE, Harvard. and MLA. You can choose your own style, but make sure you use it consistently.
Systematic Literature Review
One method that is commonly applied throughout our research is the Systematic Literature Review. This type of research forces you to focus on the available literature and establishes, in a structured manner, which parts of a research domain have already been covered by literature. There are several tools and papers available (i.e., do not reinvent the wheel with "yet another excel sheet").
An actual tool for SLR can be found here: http://alarcosj.esi.uclm.es/SLRTool/.
There is also a lot of literature available on the topic of SLR:
Analyzing the Past to Prepare for the Future: Writing a Literature Review - J. Webster, R. T. Watson - MIS Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 2. (2002), pp. 13-23.
Okoli, C., Schabram, K. (2009). "Protocol for a Systematic Literature Review of Research on the Wikipedia," . Sprouts: Working Papers on Information Systems, 9(65). http://sprouts.aisnet.org/9-65 (downloadable)
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