GO
de-DEen-US

SEARCH STRATEGIES

Use wildcards (in case of to less search results)

You can use a wild-card or truncation (here it's the common: * ) to conduct a search in which you use

  • the beginning of a word only e.g. cell* --> yields cell, cells, cellular, cell-cell communication...
  • the word beginning and ending e.g. anti*al --> yields antifungal, antiviral, antibial
  • the middle e.g. *vir* --> yields coronavirus, environment´, cytomegaloviruses, neurovirology
  • the word ending e.g. *logical --> yields biological, biotechnological, microbiological, ecological, mechanobiological
  • or if you wish to define certain letters as variables: behavi*r --> yields behavior, behaviour

Use Sorting and filter options or search suggestions (in case of too many, but less suitable search results)

  • Sort function (above hit list): Sort by Score, title, author, year - preset Relevance
  • Filter options (left): for example, Year, languages ​​...
  • Search suggestions: "Did you mean ..." - or you use your own alternative concepts / synonyms
  • Modify your search query via specifying several categories in the Advanced Search: Katalog-Recherche

NOT FOUND DESPITE FOLLOWING THOSE SEARCH STRATEGIES?

Contact us regarding what you need, perhaps we can purchase it or help otherwise.

PURPOSE OF THE SEARCH & EFFORT

The invested effort and which database or portal you could check depends also on what exactly you need:

Aim/ purpose of the literature search

Effort / required material

To be up-to-date in a subject area

4-5 well-founded article for a very first impression

Habilitation, Promotion

Thematic overview/ „sweeping swipe“, to broaden one's horizons

Diploma/ Bachelor/ Master thesis, seminal paper/ report, term paper

Is mostly an academic work for a PhD-student --> See above

To apply for a research fund

Comprehensive systematic review of previous research results

Contract and third party research, cooperation with the Economy, technology transfer, Patent Application

Well-founded and usually complex examination of the state of the art

Speech/ presentation, symposion, conference

Basic literature or latest articles or studies

search tools

The choice of the search instrument depends on the type of information or the publication type you need.

The following research tools are available:

  • Library catalogs
  • databases
  • Internet search services

 

Library catalogs

You can search the collections of libraries or library networks via library catalogs:

our collection

 local (Braunschweig) regional supra-regional to national

catalog of HZI-Library *

* references the whole print collection (Books, Final theses, Book series, journal titles etc.) and the electronic collection (exkl. eBooks, Datenbanken because of seperate entrance interfaces) of HZI-Library; via specific search categories (title, persons, publication year etc.)

- University library of the TU Braunschweig / Technical University Brunswick

- Braunschweig's libraries and archives (e.g. Stadtbibliothek/ public library Braunschweig, Stadtarchiv/ municipal archive Braunschweig)

- library of the Hochschule Hannover

- Medizinische Hochschule Hannover (MHH)

GBV- Verbundkatalog

Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (KVK)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please note: library catalogs do not contain full-text-articles or book chapters!
For searching inside of texts (e.g. book chapters, journal articles) please use
databases and if you don't get the full text then you can a) search in our catalog for the source (e.g. journal/ book title) or b) send us a document delivery request.

To search information on our library portal please use the Website-Suche -

To search our collection in a fast way you can use the entry field "Your search" which appears on each page top right (more search categories in the search mask of the advanced search)search field your search (top right on page)

 

Search tips (regarding modifying a search, different operators etc.) can be found at Katalog and in the footer of the simple search and advanced search.

We also offer books on Scientific writing (see results on "scientific writ*")

 

Databases

These databases are licenced by us:

Database

a) Access

b) Help

Scopus : the most comprehensible provider of journals in our research area(s) as it is the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. 

a) all content is available on campus

b) Scopus trainingdesk *   

SciFinder biggest chemical database worldwide (incl. PatentPak, see Enhanced features in SciFinders Patent document viewer PatentPak)

a) for login data please contact the library director  => please contact Mr. Plähn (only accessible on campus)

b) SciFinder training *

Pubmed free portal (maintained by the NLM) which comprises more than 23 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books and contains PubMed Central with approx. 2,4 million articles free to use (see list of PMC Journals)

a) free to use, several articles requires a charge

b) Pubmed Help *for a brief overview of searching PubMed, see the Quick Start section. For more specified topics click on the helpdesk's "contents"

Journal Citation Reports displays the impact factor of a specific journal, only accessible on campus

JCR/ Incites (new interface with enhanced statistical query options)

a) available on campus

b) JCR help *

* or ask us

 

Internet search services

In the Internet (see limits below) you search for scientific purposes at best via scientific search engines:

GoogleScholar reaches a part of the deep web (journal articles, books, final theses, conference papers, abstracts, preprints, publisher's notes etc.

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)

see BASE zum Finden von OpenAccess-Publikationen nutzen

specifically for scientific documents in open access that crawls a huge amount of institutional repositories with over 60 million documents from nearly 3.000 sources.

search.bioPreprint

see Sciencetools and Aktuelles-/News-posting from 28.6.16 "Preprints : publish your papers and search for preprints of others via search.bioPreprint"

Preprint servers (arxiv.org, bioRxiv.org etc.) enable the direct and open delivery of new knowledge, with search.bioPreprint it is now easy to search and access biomedical research published in preprint format (until now it was not possible to identify them as they are normally not indexed)

Limits in case of Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. and GoogleScholar are:

  1. "Although the advanced search option (in Google Scholar) allows searching by specified bibliographic information such as author and publishing year, you may still not be able to access the information you need. Searching by specified bibliographic information assumes that the information has been described, for example by author or year. Since this is done automatically, mistakes occur, and consequently information is missed.
  2.  It is unclear which content actually is being indexed. Because of limited storage capacity and retrieval speed, information is indexed only to a certain extent. Therefore, do not expect to find everything by using search engines. A large number of publications remain invisible when they are:
  • Not posted on the web

  • Not linked to and therefore not captured by a crawler

  • content hidden behind paywalls

  • Hidden in databases

  • Located within private sites of organisations, governments and companies

  • Not found because of your personal settings

  • Listed beyond the first pages "  (via Tutorial 'PhD on track' )