This document provides information on exploiting library resources to support literature reviews and staying up-to-date in one's field of research. It discusses how a good literature review clarifies understanding, places research in context, and identifies relevant methodology. It also outlines bibliographic tools for comprehensive searching, citation searching, and record keeping. Finally, it introduces email alerts, RSS feeds, social networking, and bibliographic management tools for continuously tracking the latest research.

1. Exploiting information: getting the
most from the OU Library
Fiona Durham and Wendy Mears
20 March 2013

2. Our session will cover..
• Literature review and sources of help
• Keeping up to date
• Bibliographic management tools

3. A good literature review will..
• clarify your understanding of the field
• explain the rationale for your research
• place your research within a broader context
• evaluate the results of previous research
• define key concepts and ideas
• identify research in related areas that are generalisable
or transferable to your topic
• identify relevant methodological issues.
• (taken from Uni New England library website:
• http://www.une.edu.au/library/eskillsplus/literature/litreview.php

4. Lit review - doing it well
• Comprehensive searching
• Citation searching
• Good record keeping

5. Help and training resources
• Information skills for researchers on Library website
• Training sessions, online or F2F
• Subject specialists within the Library
• Immediate help via Library helpdesk

6. Keeping up to date
• Introducing you to ways of keeping up-to-date
using electronic tools

7. Email alerts, RSS feeds and tracking
engines allow you to:
• Set up, save and re-run your searches against latest
additions to databases
• Set up profiles to receive automatically the contents
pages of journal issues
• Receive notification of articles recently published and
added to a database
• Keep up to date with breaking news
• Discover new resources in your field

8. Email alerting services
• Two types
– Journal table of contents(TOC) based
– Search based: keywords, authors, subject
• Examples
– Zetoc Alert
– TicTOCs: http://www.tictocs.ac.uk
– IEEE Explore

9. Zetoc
• Zetoc provides access to the
British Library’s Electronic Table
of Contents of around 28,000
current journals and around 16,000
conference proceedings published
per year

10. Other updating tools (1)
• Setting up RSS feeds
– Netvibes: http://www.netvibes.com
– Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/
• Social networking tools
– ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net

15. Other updating tools (2)
• Social bookmarking
– Diigo: http://www.diigo.com
• Social citation sharing
– Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com
• Tracking website changes
– TrackEngine:
http:www.trackengine.com/servlets/com.nexlabs.trac

19. Bibliographic management
tools

20. Useful links
• Services for Researchers page
http://www.open.ac.uk/library/services/researchers
• Information skills for researchers
• http://www.open.ac.uk/library/services/information-skills-
for-researchers
• Bibliographic management page
• http://www.open.ac.uk/library/help-and-
support/bibliographic-management
• Wikipedia page comparing reference management
software
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_m
anagement_software