Researching and Writing Literature Reviews
Tools
Catalogs
The physical contents of the UA Libraries: books, serials, maps, videos (VHS, DVD and other formats), etc., as well as links to electronic resources where available. SABIO indexes the contents of the Main Library, Special Collections, Science-Engineering, Fine Arts, Architecture, and the Center for Creative Photography. It also includes the Law Library's collection. The Arizona Health Sciences Library has a separate catalog, as do other libraries within the UA system that are not part of the UA Libraries' organization. You'll find links to those catalogs on the SABIO catalog search page, near the bottom.
WorldCat indexes all types of material cataloged by libraries throughout the world, and is the closest thing available to a universal catalog. This is a great resource for finding materials not at the UA Libraries and in some cases not available in the United States.
RLG Union Catalog/RLIN Bibliographic File
The RLG Union Catalog (RLIN Bibliographic File) lists the collections of many major research and academic libraries. The database includes books and serials, as well as maps, music scores, sound recordings, videos and computer files. The use of this database costs the UA Library an HOURLY CONNECT FEE as well as PER SEARCH FEES! In order for the UA Library to continue to make this available to the university, please search efficiently and use the exit button to logoff promptly.
Databases
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (Dissertation Abstracts)
Dissertation & Theses is an index of all doctoral dissertations and some master's theses from most North American and many European colleges and universities. Dissertations published from 1980 forward include 350- word abstracts written by the author. Master's theses published from 1988 forward include 150-word abstracts.
Includes full text of dissertations from 1996 to present. NOTE: Some full text is not available due to restrictions placed by the author, patents pending or problems regarding use of copyrighted material without permission.
- to determine what research on your topic has already been performed by other graduate students in your field.
to find bibliographies on your topic.
- to get a good overview of the various theoretical approaches to your topic/discipline.
Current Research @ the University of Arizona Current Research @ the University of Arizona searches Dissertation Abstracts (above) solely for those dissertations and theses submitted by graduate students at the University of Arizona for degree credit. Current Research goes back to 1924; however, it can't be used to search for theses and dissertations by university department. Use Current Research @ the University of Arizona:
- to determine what research has been done by other graduate students at the University of Arizona in your sponsoring department.
- to get a better idea of what your sponsoring department is seeking from its students and researchers.
Citation Indexes is a complex database offering several tools of great value to the graduate and faculty researcher; two of them, Social Science Citation Index and Journal Citation Reports on the Web, are linked below. With Citation Indexes, you can search for citations to articles in scholarly and academic journals, find links to full-text articles, and search for articles that cite a particular work or author.
- Social Science Citation Index
Use SSCI to searchfor citations and abstracts to articles in many of the most important scholarly and academic journals in social science. SSCI also gives you access to "Cited References," with which you can determine how often a particular author or article has been cited by other researchers, an important measure of the importance of a author and her/his work in the field. There is an excellent tutorial on how to use "Cited References" linked here: http://www.isinet.com/tutorials/ccrs/index.html.
- Journal Citation Reports (JCR) on the Web - Science and Social Science Editions
JCR allows you to gauge the relative importance of a particular journal within a field of inquiry by measuring a number of factors: impact ( the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year), total citation counts ("total cites" - the total number of times that each journal has been cited by all journals included in the database within the current product year), and other factors.
Writing Tools
RefWorks is an internet-based bibliographic utility. It allows you to store an unlimited number of citations and sort them in a variety of formats. With RefWorks, you can easily import references from other databases and automatically sort and format them in seconds. The UA Libraries has licensed RefWorks so that any student, faculty member or staffer at the UA can register free and create their own web-accessible database. RefWorks is comparable, but not identical, to ProCite and EndNote. If you already own a copy of ProCite or EndNote, you do not need a RefWorks account; however, one of the advantages of RefWorks is that it allows one to access one's personal database from any web-enabled PC or Mac, whereas with ProCite or EndNote, you must use those programs on the computer on which they're loaded. For a comparison of utilities, see the excellent review of RefWorks and EndNote available from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries here: http://www.library.wisc.edu/instruction/refworks/endnote_refworks.htm.