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Research Tools: Home

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Here you will find tools that you may helpful in your searching of research literature.


Bibliometric Tools

Now that there are very large directories and databases of publications, it is possible to harness citation and usage data to measure the impact and influence of specific articles, journals or authors. This approach is called Bibliometrics.

Bibliometrics measures are increasingly being used to value the work of researchers but are subject to much criticism. They are only as good as the databases they draw on. High citation does not necessarily equate with high quality research. They focus more on articles than books and are more closely calibrated to patterns of publishing within the sciences than the social sciences, or particularly the humanities. Because of this, there have been attempts to create alternative metrics, or Altmetrics. This can be done by adjusting the formulas used in common bibliometric measures or by looking for other measures, including mentions on the web and in social media.

  • Some of the Library’s databases (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus) enable you to navigate article by citation, looking back at the works an article has cited and then forward to see where that article has been cited subsequently by others. They generate scores for article and authors (h-index) based on those numbers.
  • Journal Citation Reports uses the Web of Science database to rank journals by their ‘Impact Factor’.
  • Google scholar provides limited citation analysis.
  • UEA Library Search (not sure what link to provide here- think it is Search everything EDS platform) provides some Altmetrics within its search results, including social media mentions (look out for the links to PLUMX METRICS)
  • The Metrics Toolkit -useful guide to the main Bibliometric and Altmetric measures (Impact Factor, h-Index, altmetric views), describing how they are calculated and looking at the pros and cons.

Setting Up Publication Alerts

It can be challenging to keep up to date with new publications, but this can be very important- especially if you are engaged in a long research project or undertaking PhD research. Traditionally researchers have kept up to date by browsing new journal issues but setting up publications’ alerts can automate the process for you, making it easier to keep up to date.

  • Use BrowZine. This enables you to set up virtual bookshelves with journals of interest and receive notifications when new issues are available.  
  • Register to receive email notifications from journal and publisher websites. You can also do this within Library Search searching on a journal title and then using the ‘Share’ button that appears with the search results to set up a regular email (or RSS ) alert for new articles
  • You can also create alerts for authors you are interested or even for subject and keyword searches. Similar tools are available in many of the large databases UEA makes available.
  • JournalTOCs enables you to receive tables of contents for over 30,000 journals as new issues are published- although this is done through RSS, so you’ll need an RSS reader.
  • Social media is used by many researchers, e.g. X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook.
  • Researcher sites such ResearchGate, Academia and Mendeley also enable researchers to keep up with new publications.

Help

Need help with research tools? 

Contact your Academic Librarian.