Comments on: Literature searching and maps

By: EVC

EVC — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 16:41:15 +0000

David, the SCOPUS thing is awesome. Excellent filtering, citations right there! Thanks for the tip. Haven’t tried exporting yet.

By: David Brake

David Brake — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 16:05:58 +0000

Rather than searching Worldcat from the web then exporting you can search it directly from within Endnote using its “connect” feature. Of course the way that Endnote is set up on our machines internally doesn’t work too well but if you go to Edit/Preferences and change “folder locations” so it points to folders you create instead of the standard Endnote folders you can fill those folders with only the Endnote connection and formatting folders you have created. The OCLC WorldCat connection filter the LSE has is broken but has since been fixed and is downloadable here.

I should also mention that Scopus, the new Reed Elsevier search engine offering “access to 14,000 peer-reviewed titles” which we are trialling has some really good features and is worth checking out.

By: EVC

EVC — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 08:52:56 +0000

Hi Wainer,

Thanks for the comments!

Regarding comment 1. I know nothing about Atlas-TI - how would it work? But assuming that it would do some kind of electronic parsing, my impression from developing the abstract maps is that, like other academic work, there is quite a bit of judgement involved. For example, you could develop a map that looked only at empirical topics, one that looked at theoretical approaches, one that was a bit of a mix. So I don’t know how an electronic tool would handle that. Also I find it to be pretty quick work - the media literacy map was done in an afternoon once I had everything printed - so I worry whether the electronic setup, tinkering etc would be slower? I’d be very interested to hear the results if you try this.

Comment two: you are right, it’s much better for articles than books. But, if you abstracted the books or had a volume of notes, for example, you could still map them, or use an electronic tool to process them somehow. I think Sebastian used nVivo, for example, to work with his reading notes. I haven’t done this at all.

Comment three: cool, I will check out the library of congress.

By: wainer

wainer — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 07:17:30 +0000

I’m impressed. This is truly amazing, and hugely helpful. I wish I had this advice 5 years ago. Three minor comments.

First thing I don’t get is: you created the map form the printed abstracts, right? If not, why not use atlas-ti and do it electronically? (another 70 quid, I reckon)

Second thing is: this is exceptionally good for articles, far less for books as things are now. Firstly because have no abstract, and annotation takes far more time (though I don’t know about OCLC, I’ll take a look). Second because they are mostly printed at present. With e-books things may change.

Third, I seem to remember that the US Library of Congress does cited books as well, with titles of chapters. Far easier to access as the filter is great. But I should double-check again. I have made a few ENDNOTE filters myself, if you ned help with one just shout.

Thanks again for the great tips.

Wainer