finding out about things already being done

Question

hi,

i just wanted to know how to do a search of things already being done if you are writing a research paper... is the google only place? if not please suggest me places or ways of finding out about the existing literature on some topic that is related to my publication paper...

in general now i have to list all (if not most) papers that did the similar things for what i have done... but not for case x.

thanks...

Answer 1

If you're in college you should have access to an electronic and searchable database of various academic journals in your field of study.

If not there are some web sites and services that offer at least the searching of such journals for abstracts of papers, though I don't know any off the top of my head.

Answer 2

Your library might be a good place to start, I believe they index periodicals so you can easily find certain articles.

However since publications don't have to be registered (for lack of a better word) anywhere, I don't believe there is a central location to lookup papers covering a specific topic.

Answer 3

Using Google Scholar, and search engines of publishers, such as IEEE, ACM, you should be able to find the basic contributions in your field of research. From there on you can find papers referring these basic ones, find new referred papers, and so on.

Answer 4

This completely depends on what you're researching. Try IEEE and IET though:

http://www.theiet.org/publishing/ http://www.ieee.org/portal/site

Answer 5

Thousands of papers are published to http://arxiv.org/. You could spend the rest of your life researching there :)

Answer 6

Try http://www.ieee.org but you may have to take their membership to fully access all their documents.

Answer 7

I frequently use

1. arXiv.org
2. Citeseer (one of my favorites.)
3. Google Scholar
4. Wolfram alpha
5. BEST WAY : You can always mail to some knowledgeable person in the field.
   (e.g. for C# mailto:jonskeet :-)
6. List of such things here.
7. Infomine
8. Scirus - for scientific information only.
9. You can also search in the references section of popular books about your research topic.