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Google Scholar is an easy-to-use discovery tool for academic papers. You will see PolyU eLinks for the article we subscribed if you access Google Scholar in the campus, which allows you to access full-text of the articles from the library.
However, there will not be PolyU eLinks in Google Scholar while you are off-campus. In this case, you can still access the articles we subscribed via Google Scholar@PolyU from the library homepage, or via library links setting in Google Scholar:
Search in a database
Searching within a database helps you narrow your search as the coverage of the database can be very selective. Some databases focus on one specific area, which can help you filter out the contents that are not relevant to the subject; some may cover peer-reviewed journals only, to ensure the articles covered are of certain quality.
Almost all databases will provide an Advanced Search option, which allows you to search in a more precise way, e.g. search within article title, journal title, or subject terms (that are tagged to each article). This helps you find the most relevant results quickly and effectively.
Many Health related databases also have one's own controlled vocabulary built-in, to help users to retrieve results by the database's preferred indexed terms. To name a few commonly used controlled vocabularies: MeSH, EmTree, CINAHL Subject Headings.
Note that login with NetID is required to access the following databases off campus.
[Note] If you want to conduct a comprehensive literature review on a research topic, or is involved in a Systematic Review, see the details in the other subject guide: Systematic Search for Systematic Review.
To locate reference materials in Chinese, try these:
[Note] If you want to conduct a comprehensive literature review on a research topic, or is involved in a Systematic Review, see the details in the other subject guide: Systematic Search for Systematic Review.
Search in a citation database
Web of Science and Scopus are two large multidisciplinary citation databases.
They do not provide full-text articles, but they are very helpful for exploring related articles by looking at citing articles (who cited the article) and references (who have been cited by the article). If you do not have an idea which databases or journals should go for, start with these two.
Full text not available? Try ILL!
The Library's Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service provides access to materials not held in our collections to current students, faculty and staff of PolyU for their research or private study. The Library will source the requested items from local UGC-funded libraries or other libraries overseas.
Interlibrary loan is integrated into OneSearch. To know more about the service, please refer to the guide below.
Once you found a relevant article (i.e. a seed document), there are several ways to get more related articles from it. The most commonly used way is relying on the "related articles" or "recommended readings" suggested by the database. Below is an example in OneSearch:
Another skill is citation chaining. The assume is: If a paper citing or being cited by another paper, they normally share similar topics. Citation chaining can be further divided into Backward Chaining and Forward Chaining.
Backward chaining means locating other papers cited by the seed document. You may simply locate those papers from the reference list of your seed document:
One disadvantage of backward citation is: you can only locate the materials published before the seed document. However, you can locate more up-to-date materials by Forward Chaining.
Forward citation chaining means locating other papers citing the seed document.
You can make use of OneSearch, or other citation databases (like Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar) to locate those papers.
Click here for more databases on Dissertations & Theses.
PolyU Institutional Research Archive (PIRA) is an online platform that actively collects and disseminates the research and scholarly outputs created by the PolyU community. Learn more at https://libguides.lb.polyu.edu.hk/ira/intro
