Navigation & Maritime
Databases for advanced literature searching
Scopus and Web of Science are competitor product databases which search across selected journals from many different publishers and provide advanced features for analysing results to see trends in the literature. They can be useful for identifying review papers, highly cited papers and for searching by author. They are most useful at final project stage and for Masters and Post Graduate Researchers. You could use both or choose one which you prefer - the journal coverage is slightly different so see which one is a best fit for your project although many of the same journals are indexed by both tools.
Advanced searching support
How to devise a search strategy
Identify your keywords and get familiar with exact phrase searching, truncation, wildcards and combining terms
Final year project: literature review
How to scope the literature, identify key papers, key authors and set the scene for your final project.
Systematic Review methodology for literature searching
A systematic review is a research methodology useful for researchers writing a review article to be published. This approach could be useful for PGT students and PGRs.
SAGE Research Methods
The Library subscribes to SAGE Research Methods: a portal of text, video & project planner resources explaining different quantitative and qualitative approaches to carrying out research. Ideal for project stage students, PGT students and PGRs.
Final year project: books in the Library
The Library also has a number of print and Ebooks on how to write a literature review and how to undertake a dissertation project. Some of these are specifically written for Engineering projects. A collated list of these titles is available:
Reading list of books explaining how to do a Literature Review and undertake a research project
Access to journal articles not in the Library's collection
When you are producing your own research project (whether final stage undergraduate, Masters projects or PhD and beyond), you will use many more resources and may need to access resources outside of the Library's full text collections. This page explains how identify content the Library does not subscribe to and how to request access to support your learning and research.
Open Access browser extensions (find 'free' versions of paywalled .pdfs)OA tools can be used by anyone!
Open Access refers to legally accessible, free of charge access to published research outputs. The journal articles we view through Primo or Web of Science or the majority of those that open full text through from Google Scholar are due the Library paying an annual subscription payment to the publisher. Public money is used to fund research grants and there is now a growing Open Access movement to ensure that the public can also access the outputs of these grants without additional charge.
Inter Library Loans
Inter Library Loans (ILLS) are only available for students working on final year projects, Masters dissertations, researchers and academic staff.
ILLs are requests for journal articles not in the Library's collection. The Library will purchase one-off journal articles for students at dissertation stage from the British Library. Articles will be emailed direct from the British Library to your inbox. They cannot be saved and will expire after a given time due to copyright. You will need a certain version of Adobe on your p.c.
ILLs can be requested via the link on Primo and full guidance is available:
Library Skills Guide: Inter Library Loans - everything you need to know
