Overview Literature Search Engines (databases)

3 min read1 day ago

The goal of this page is to communicate the variety of
academic and public search engines.

Academia in the past has tried to limited access to work by using
collections of academic work which only where accessible via a payed subscription.

These so called curated databases are slowly being made available via
search engines that have obtained a subscription, the win-win is that the commercial database gains another channel for people to find their papers. Readers still need to pay for reading the complete article.

For researchers the struggle to find existing knowledge has now slowly turned from identifying knowledge toward gaining access to the knowledge, thanks to the search engines listed on this page and polices in the EU and US.

In Europe there is the agreement that public money needs to result in public knowledge. This statement has provided a lot of momentum to open science databases, enabling researcher to not only find knowledge, but also read and acquire knowledge.

How to build a query

Step — Ideate (diverge)

Identify main constructs aka topics.
Create a list of synonyms per constructs.
Tip — Use the ideation search engines to find relevant papers to find relevant constructs and synonyms; This requires you to have a starting paper.
Tip — If you do not have a paper to start with, then select a random search engine of type 2 and enter a few words you like.
Tip — When you found a relevant paper, return here and start collecting ~5 similar papers via the type 1 search engines.

Step — Narrow (converge)

Create a “narrowed” list of keywords per construct.
Note —Create per keyword a separate table, with the keyword in one column and than the synonyms in the second column.
Note — Every keywords/ synonym is already delimited by ” ”, e.g. ”maturity model”.
Note — Every keyword is already separated by the word OR in capitals, e.g. ”maturity model” OR “maturity models”.
Note — The collection of words is delimited by ( ), e.g. ( “maturity model” OR “maturity models” ).

Step — Execute search query (literature review)

Create one entry based on the selection of “narrowed” keywords.
Open each search engine of type 2 in a seperate tab (via ctrl+click), and run per search engine the same single line query you have created.
Tip — You use the word AND in capitals between the created sets of narrowed keywords, e.g. ( “maturity model” OR “maturity models” ) AND ( “cybersecurity” OR “cyber security” )
Tip — Do this in one table, where you see the keywords and the separation by OR and AND clearly.
Tip — Create a copy of the combined narrowed keywords, and make it a single line, e.g. see this page as example of that: Literature search: Cyber Resilience Maturity Models SLR. This because most search engines like a combination of keywords are in one line.
Tip — If you want to know more on the usage of ( ), AND, OR in your search engine you can google fore: “boolean search query example university library”

Type 1 — Ideation

These search engines are fun when you already have a paper, and want to search the connected papers. This can be connected via authors cites (backward snowballing), of finding other papers citing the seed paper (forward snowballing), or via related papers.

This method is nice to discover related keywords, related domains and identifying discourse.

See my gitlab wiki page for more details on the type 2 search engines and how to create the search queries including examples — https://gitlab.com/edzob/complex_adaptive_systems-knowledge_base/-/wikis/Literature-Search