Literature research

Are you looking for something specific and want to read it as soon as possible? If so, first search in ZHAW swisscovery. In the case of scientific articles and literature that have not been published by a publisher (so-called grey literature), Google Scholar can also provide you with rapid help.

What if you don’t yet know what you are looking for and want to conduct a thematic search? If this is the case, various search tools are available for your research depending on which publication types you are looking for and how much you already know about your topic.

Library catalogues and discovery systems

Library catalogues of university libraries are research platforms that provide access to their entire scientific media collection. This means that books, series, journals and non-book materials as well as billions of electronic articles are listed.

Traditional library catalogues are increasingly being replaced by so-called discovery systems, and this is no different at the ZHAW. These are based on search engine technology and can search through data from various sources. They index university repositories, other scientific data sources and publishing portals, thus making it possible to also find grey literature (e.g. working papers, university dissertations).

• ZHAW swisscovery serves as a single point of entry to search the media of the ZHAW University Library as well as freely accessible electronic resources.
• Academic search engines (e.g. Google Scholar) also allow for the interdisciplinary retrieval of scientific publications.

Databases

Specialist databases (e.g. PsycInfo or IEEE) specifically record scientific literature from a specialist area and, where applicable, its neighbouring disciplines. In such databases, you can generally find scientific journal articles, contributions in edited volumes and monographs, in some cases with a direct link to the full text. Specialist databases offer comprehensive search possibilities as well as filter and sort options. Look at the database help page if you are unsure exactly what the database offers.

Depending on the specialist area, the "right" database has to be chosen for systematic research. A discipline-specific overview of the specialist databases licensed at the ZHAW University Library can be found here:

Interdisciplinary databases (e.g. Web of Science) contain a targeted selection of high-quality scientific publications from different disciplines. They offer comprehensive search, filter and sort options. Interdisciplinary database aggregators (e.g. OvidSP, ProQuest, EBSCOhost) provide search interfaces that can also be used to conduct interdisciplinary research across several specialist bibliography databases.

And when should you search where?

In which situations would it be preferable to search in ZHAW Swisscovery or a specialist database (tips can be found in the document "Search for ... Find in ...")? Drag the statements to the appropriate field.

Repositories

Collections of texts and other digital objects, as well as their metadata, are referred to as repositories (e.g. the ZHAW digitalcollection). They are generally provided by universities or other organisations involved in academic activities.
DThe independent publication form in repositories allows for the immediate publication of information and is thus the quickest possible way to make findings usable.

Electronic scientific documents in repositories or on publisher sites generally have a DOI (digital object identifier). versehen. This is used for clear and permanent identification, working in a similar way to an ISBN number. The DOI is used for linking and citations.

The repositories of Swiss universities can be searched via ZHAW swisscovery. To do so, select "swisscovery" (instead of "ZHAW") in the search field. You can limit your hits according to the different repositories under the "Data Source" filter.

You can search globally for research data repositories from various academic disciplines at Re3data.org (Registry of Research Data Repositories).

Publishing portals

Publishing portals (e.g. Springer) generally offer a search interface for the electronic resources of the respective publisher. Here, it is often also possible to search for keywords in the full texts.

 AI-Tools

There are AI tools for various tasks, including literature research. These tools offer you different possibilities.