Top tips for Finding Research Paper
8 tips to use Scinapse for your research
‘Research’ is an act of using accumulated previous knowledge results to make new or better knowledge. That means, research is an expansion on previous studies. Therefore, when researchers begin their own projects, exploring the previous studies is the first and most important step.
By exploring previous research outputs, researchers could achieve the followings:
- Narrow down and specify their research topic
- Prevent doing duplicate research
- Get inspirations from experimental, research, or analytical methodologies
- Detect errors in previous studies or even lead to better results
So, how do researchers explore the previous studies?
The key is academic papers. This is because most of the research outputs are published in the form of papers and organized and disseminated through journals. Therefore exploration for the previous studies is de facto searching for papers in journals.
Unlike in the past, nowadays most of the papers are digitized so that researchers can easily access papers through the Internet. Nonetheless, researchers still struggle with discovering papers they need for their research. The problem is that researchers are trapped in the sea of information because of the explosive increase in the number of papers published. Even now, as you read this article, new researches are in progress, and new papers are being published. Therefore researchers use services such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, or ScienceDirect for following up on them.
Scinapse which is introduced in this post is emerging academic search engine. It has the advantage of intuitive feeds and fast searching.
Most importantly, Scinapse is not just a service focused on indexing data. Scinapse is trying to collect, refine, and normalize all the academic data. For example, they are progressing Author name disambiguation project. Author name disambiguation project aims to find all publications that belong to a given author and distinguish them from publications of other authors who share the same name. Scinapse tries to provide researchers with better and reliable academic information through this project.
Now, let’s check out some tips for using Scinapse!
This post is based on the January 2019 update.
If Scinapse has been updated, other tips will come up.
Basic strategy: Let’s narrow down search results!
1. Choosing a clear keyword
After analyzing the main concept of the subject under research, organize keywords. And then add the substitutable expressions for the keywords to expand the list. Referring to the recommended keywords under the search box will be a good help.
2. Using the publication year filter
After you search for a specific keyword, you can easily check the trend of that keyword over time with the Publication Year filter. If you want to know the starting point of your research field, you may filter based on the past. Or if you want to know about the recent trends in the field, filtering based on recent publication would be helpful.
3. Setting the FOS for the keywords
It is difficult to find the desired results with only keywords among a lot of information. For example, when searching for a broad keyword such as “game theory”, it could contain an economics field or a computer science field. So if you choose your field of study (FOS), the scope of results could be narrow and you can get closer to the results you want.
4. Using Impact Factor (IF)
IF CAN’T be the absolute method for evaluating papers. Because IF is based on a simple metric of the number of citations in the journal and there is a difference in frequency of citation for different fields. For example, the citation frequency of medical field is much higher than that of mathematics or engineering. So the IFs of medical journals are higher than those of mathematics or engineering journals. Therefore, individual papers cannot be evaluated with the IF. In other words, one shouldn’t determine that a paper published in a journal with a high IF is a good paper.
However, comparing the relative IF scales of papers in the same field of study can be a decent screening method.
5. Selecting specific journals
With the journal filter, you can get results for the keywords within the prominent journals in the field of study. Also, you can check which journal has papers with the search keyword.
Here are 8 tips
The tips have the following purposes:
- Tips #1, #2 and #3 are for quickly screening
- Tips #4, #5 and #6 are for extended discovery
- Tips #7 and #8 are for using papers to your research
1. Using author’s affiliation in Search result page!
In Scinapse, you can immediately check not only the author’s affiliation but also author’s estimated H-index. H-index is based on the set of the author’s most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. It could help you with quickly screening papers based on authors.
2. Using more button in Search result page!
With the more button on the search results page, you can immediately see the entire abstract without entering individual pages. This helps you quickly screen papers!
3. Checking the count of References and Citations!
The Ref button lets you see how many references the paper has, and the Cited button lets you see how many citations the paper has. You can also click this button to go directly to the list.
4. Using recommended papers!
In the right section of the paper show page, you can check the recommended papers. This can be useful if you have a small amount of information because you can obtain additional results related to the search keyword. Yes, this feature expands discovery and make in-depth searching.
5. Searching for authors related to your field of study!
You can get information about the author. This can be used as a CV if you are an author. (If the author is verified, you can see a check mark next to the name.)
6. Searching for papers published in specific journals!
You can discover the results you want in a specific journal. Simply go to the relevant journal page and use search or sort.
7. Using Collection feature!
Scinapse provides Collection feature for saving papers. You can make collections about research topics or interests, and you can save papers inside. In the collections, you can search and sort saved papers, and you can leave notes about individual papers. FYI, this feature can be used only after login.
8. Using the citation format generator!
It is very annoying to cite sources and make a list of references. Scinapse eliminates this annoyance. You just press the cite this paper button in Search results page or Paper show page. This button provides general citation formats that allow the researcher to select as needed. When you select the required form, an accurate quotation is created and you can add it to the document. When used with collections, you can efficiently manage citation sources and easily make a list of references whenever you need them.
Bonus tip
The biggest advantage of Scinapse is that it is an alive service. Use the feedback button if you want some new features! Scinapse enjoys communication with users. In other words, they accept and update a variety of ideas that could improve research discovery. The sorting feature within the collection is based on user feedback. So if you find any inconveniences or need a feature while using Scinapse, you can use this button at any time!
