During this workshop hosted by Marian Kirton we learned some tips and trick for using the Napier Library online literature searh tool.
Tip: The search bar doesn’t require ‘and’ the system associates search words together automatically.
The workshop started by walking us through a search using search terms ‘Design Emotion’ (including all items, meaning books, journals and papers).
This search produced 483,121 results.
Tip: using an asterisk ( * ) after a word tells the search system to search for anything containing that word. for example using Design* would include Designing, Designed, Designs, Designer etc.
Adding this to our search increased the results to 1,520,627.
Filtering options can be found on the right hand side of the page. Filtering by format can help narrow down what you are looking for, such as; books, journal articles, newspaper articles etc. Filtering also allows you to cut out items that are not available online – ideal for literature searching during a pandemic.
Tip: Use the publication date to filter based on current and up to date resources.
Using the Advanced searching option allows you to be even more specific about search terms, for example; putting Design into the subject.
Tip: Found a document you like? You can look at the citations that have used the same resource which can help with gathering a large number of related resources.
Reflection
There were some features explained in this workshop that I had already discovered myself, but some other ones about searching by citation, and logging into your google scholar account and linking it to your Napier account can help by showing you links for documents that can be accessed in the Library search.