Do you struggle to find documents on your topic?
The good news is that if you have just one relevant paper, then you can use that one to find many others.
Take that one interesting paper and check the following:
Are there other papers written by that author?
Are there interesting papers mentioned in the paper's bibliography?
Has this paper been cited by others?
Then, do the same thing for any paper you've found.
This is called the "snowball technique"... and it can lead you to end up with a huge amount of papers!
So always make sure that the new papers you find are actually directly relevant to your topic before you start researching them...
In the video below, you will see in details how to apply this technique, using EBSCOhost databases and Google Scholar.
Once you've done a literature search and you start looking at the results, you might get surprised...
If you're lucky, most of the results will be actually relevant to your topic.
But very often, this won't be the case.
If most of your results are not actually on the topic you were researching, you can use the following techniques to modify your search:
Searching the literature is not a very straightforward process.
In this video, I explain (in the same way that I do in class) how to do a "good" literature search and I point out good searching habits that you should take on!
To export one reference, click on it's title on the results page in order to access the full record for that reference.
Then, in the right-hand-side column, click "export"
Check "Direct export to EndNote Web" and click save.
You're done!
Exporting several references at once
In order to export several references at once, you first need to add them to a "folder".
If you have created an EBSCOhost acount, then you can save many references in your folder, over the course of several searches, and then export them all at once as explained below.
If you don't have an EBSCOhost account, you can still use the folder feature in order to export several references at once.
But be aware that those references won't be saved in EBSCOhost. It's just a temporary folder.
Add references to your folder by clicking on the blue folder next to the references on the results page.
Open the folder by clicking on "Folder" in the blue bar, at the very top of the screen.
Select the references you want to export and click on "Export"
On the next screen, select “Direct Export to
EndNote Web”, just as above. If you want, you can also click “Remove these items from the
folder after saving” to empty your folder. Click on save.
In both cases, afterwards...
A new tab opens. If you’ve not logged in into EndNote before, you have to do it now.
Click on "My References" to see your new reference. Click on its title to open it in full.
Check all of its fields. If necessary, make corrections (typos happen, even in bibliographic databases!).
Most of the bibliographic databases available through the Tavistock and Portman library are hosted by EBSCOhost.
By creating an EBSCOhost account, you will be able to save your searches and documents from all the EBSCOhost databases (PsycINFO, Pep Archive, SocIndex, etc.).
Look at the following presentation to learn how to create and use your EBSCOhost account.
Here is a short presentation I created, demonstrating step by step how to generate an RSS feed from one of your searches in EBSCOhost.
This will enable you to stay up-to-date with your field by receiving alerts whenever a new article is published that corresponds to a search that you've set up.
Do you need to do a literature review on a topic in psychological therapies?
Do you need to find an article in the field of psychology?
Then a good tool to use in the bibliographic database called PsycINFO.
Here, I made an extra-short video reminding you how to access it from the library's website.
EBSCOhost is one of our providers of bibliographic databases.
It hosts a lot of very interesting ones in the field of psychological therapies such as PsycINFO, SocINDEX, Pep Archive... You can access them from this page and can find more information here.
One of the interesting features of EBSCOhost is the folder it enables you to create.
In this folder, you can save your searches, your articles, etc. But to do that, you need to create an account.
So here is a detailed presentation showing you how to set up an EBSCOhost account:
During a session on literature search, a student asked me if it was possible to limit results to a particular geographic area.
From what I can see, when using the EbscoHOST databases that we have access to at Tavistock and Portman, the "geography" limiter (to limit your search to a particular country) seems to pop up depending on the database you’re using.
For example, you can use it with SocIndex, CINAHL or Medline.
It doesn't seem to be available in PsycINFO at the moment, but you can still use the field "PL Location" when you set up your advanced search.
Click on the image to enlarge it.
You might want to try different names (for example, “England”, “Great Britain”, “United Kingdom”, “Europe”) depending on the geographical area you’re searching, to be sure to be completely thorough.
