Nowadays, finding scientific publications is not that big of a challenge any more. Honestly, just thinking about how people did this before computer based databases fills me with terror. Just imagine a few hundred pages long reference list. On paper. Now, imagine finding all articles on the list that contain some relevant information about your specific topic. Now, go back to your computer and thank the gods of the internet.
There are a few nice tutorials about finding articles and as I don”t want to reinvent the wheel, I”ll just give you a few pointers to get you started:
Tutorials:
- wikiHow
- AACR Tutorial
- ScienceBuddies (This one is especially good.)
And a few tips I learnt through the last few years:
Tip 1: Try searching in Google (or other search engines) restricting the filetype to pdf. This way, articles on the webpages of the authors will most likely pop up.
Tip 2: If all else fails, don”t be afraid to ask the corresponding author for a copy of the article. In most cases, you”ll end up getting not just the article you asked for, but other relevant publications by the same author as well.
Feel free to share any additional tips in the comment section!
