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Use of Electronic Resources in Research

Prof. Dr. Khalid MahmoodDepartment of Library & Information Science

University of the Punjab

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Electronic Resources for all steps in research

Finding research problem / topic Gathering background literature Collecting data Analyzing data Writing research report Disseminating results

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Searching Online Resources Search Engines

General Meta Scholarly

Subject Directories Invisible / Deep Web ETDs Online Databases Online Resources of Pakistan Higher

Education Commission

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General Search Engines

Google Yahoo AltaVista FAST Search MSN Search Lycos Excite

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Google Simple Search

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Google Advanced Search

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Meta Search Engines

Transmit user-supplied keywords simultaneously to several individual search engines to carry out the search

Dogpile Mamma Metacrawler

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Dogpile

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Scholarly Search Engines

Google Scholar Infomine Librarians’ Internet Index Intute Pinakes Business Research ISI Web of Science

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Librarians’ Internet Index

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Subject DirectoriesAlso called Information Gateways and Virtual Libraries Yahoo Directory Google Directory Librarians’ Internet Index About.com Infomine The WWW Virtual Library Specialized Subject Directories

Abi Logic Solid Crawler Academic Info SOSIG - Social Science Information Gateway

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Yahoo Directory

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Invisible Web / Deep Web

Content on the Web that is not found in most search engine results

Complete Planet Internets The Invisible Web Catalog

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Complete Planet

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Electronic Theses and Dissertations - ETDs Networked Digital Library of Theses and

Dissertations Catalog of theses and doctoral dissertations

contributed by some 176 universities and 27 institutions worldwide

Proquest Dissertations & Theses Database World’s most comprehensive collection of

dissertations and theses with over 2.3 million titles

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Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

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Online Databases

Bibliographic databases ERIC, Agricola, Medline, EconLit,

PsychINFO Numeric databases

Stat-USA, UN Common Database Full text databases

ScienceDirect, Emerald, JSTOR

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ERIC Database

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Science Direct Database

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HEC – Online Resources National Digital Library

Over 30 databases with over 20000 full text journals

Accessible by 250 institutions in Pakistan Over 40,000 e-books Links to open access resources

Pakistan Research Repository Full text of over 1200 Pakistani doctoral

theses

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HEC – National Digital Library

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Pakistan Research Repository

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Online Searching Techniques

Boolean Operators Phrase Searching Truncation / Wildcard Searching Proximity Searching Focusing / Limiting a Search

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Boolean Operators

AND

OR

NOT

Boolean operators allow you to join terms together, widen a search or exclude terms from your search results. This means you can be more precise in locating your information.

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Boolean Operators at Emerald

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Phrase Searching

It narrows your search down by searching for an exact phrase or sentence. It is particularly useful when searching for a title or a quotation. Usually quotation marks are used to connect the words together.

For example“Towards a healthier Scotland”

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Truncation / Wildcard SearchingThese search techniques retrieve information on

similar words by replacing part of the word with a symbol usually a * or ?. However, different databases use different symbols, so check what is used.

In truncation the end of the word is replaced. For example physiother* will retrieve physiotherapy,

physiotherapeutic, physiotherapist and so on. In wildcard searching, letters from inside the word

are replaced. For example wom*n will retrieve the terms woman and

women.

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Proximity Searching

It looks for documents where two or more separately matching term occurrences are within a specified distance, where distance is the number of intermediate words or characters

For example Term A NEAR Term B Term A ADJ Term B

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Focusing / Limiting a SearchThere are many ways to focus your search and

all search tools offer different ways of doing this. Some of the ways of limiting your search are as follows:

Date Language Place Publication type Age groups Type of material e.g. you could just need to

find case studies

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Thanks for your patience