Literature Review – How the Library Can Help

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Literature Review – How the Library Can Help

The Technion Libraries offer the Technion community access to a variety of sources for their literature review, such as books and Ebooks, articles, conference proceedings, annual meetings, dissertations (theses), patents, technical data, market surveys and more. Here are some “tips” that​ can help you search for materials for your literature review, evaluate what you find, organize and cite it.

Many of your search terms have synonyms, some of them are not currently in use but perhaps were in the past. You should be familiar with all the variations and combine them within your search.   

Prepare a list of the terminology of your subject area using these options:

Please note – If you are not using a thesaurus, the database does not have one or you haven’t found your terms in the database’s thesaurus, you can always combine your keywords by using the operators AND / OR / NOT.

Example

Below is an example of a combined keyword search in SCOPUS database (a multidisciplinary resource) BUT also in Web of sciencePUBMEDEngineering VillagePsycinfo and more:

“Diabetes mellitus type 2” OR “Diabetes mellitus type II”

AND

“Insulin Secreting Cells” OR  “Pancreatic beta Cells”

NOT

mice OR mouse OR rat

The retrieved results will include the variations of search terms which were combined by the OR operators and will not include the words mice, mouse or rat.

  • Library Search Systems– “Articles & more” (EDS) – Allows users to perform a combined-search within the library catalog and databases all together. “Book & More” – For books names, Technion theses, journal name etc.
  • Library Databases– General or subject specific.
  • Google Scholar (GS)– A multidisciplinary free-to-use database which searches within a variety of sources. It is important to know that GS is not a selective database, thus, many results are in low quality.

If you are in campus and using a desktop computer or a secured wireless connection, you will enjoy a full availability of our resources, no identification needed. For other cases, please follow the instruction in our off-campus page.

It is very important to be very critical about your search findings. In other words, in order to use the information that you find it is important to look for signs of quality which include the source’s impact factor, the author’s H-index, citations and more. You can find help to base your research on high-quality information in this complete evaluation tools guide. ​

If you come across with a resource which is not available to Technion users, don’t be hasty to give it up. In these cases we offer you the services of our Interlibrary Loan and D ocument Supply (ILL).

The ILL department enables ordering of items that are not part of the collections of the Technion, from other academic libraries in Israel and from academic libraries around the world.​

Citation Management Tools allow you to store, organize and share your research citations (books, articles, theses, patents and more) and automatically format your bibliographies in academic writing in a wide variety of styles.

Read more: “Citation Tools”

Use of digital services provided by the Technion Libraries must be in compliance with the Israel Copyright Law and legal agreements signed between the Technion libraries, MALMAD and the publishers. Please read our Copyright & Fair Use Guidelines for better understanding of copyright issues.​

  • Define your research topic.
  • Collect all the keywords and synonyms.
  • Choose the right databases and instruct you on how to use them (theses, articles, patents, technical information, data and more).
  • Evaluate your findings.
  • Learn how to manage, organize and cite your references with reference management tools.

For any questions please feel free to contact the Reference and Instruction Services at the Technion Libraries or go to “Contact Us” for other contact routes.