How to Find Research Articles

Welcome to a mini tutorial on how to start researching on a topic and finding articles.

In this tutorial we will focus on finding a review article which is a type of article that
summarises a specific area of the literature.
This is usually the best place to start when you are new to a topic.
The skills in this tutorial are easily transferable to finding a specific article that you may
have in mind.
You will need to have access to the internet and will probably be asked to log into a
number of pages using your z-number and z-pass.
It is best if you actually follow the instructions to find the article* in this tutorial. Just
reading through this will not be very effective.
*Note that the article is one chosen at random and reading it is not a requirement of
this course.

We will begin at the library website.

 Tutorial outline
1. Use the library website
2. Access the “Web of Science” Database
3. Use the database to search for articles
4. Find further information about the article
5. Find a “Fulltext” version of the article to read
 Go to the library website

Click on “Find Databases”

Go to the library website and click on “Find Databases”. Databases are collections of
publications from different journals/publishers.
 Find the database named “Web of Science”
You could also look for others like “PsycInfo” and “Pubmed”

- You could also search for these alphabetically, but a Name search is fastest
when you know which database you want
- These databases allow you to search through a large number of journals across
a range of topics
The search has found the database. Click on it!
*Note: If you are not logged on from a UNSW
computer, you may be prompted several times to
enter your Z-number and Z-pass
This is the main search page. From here you can specify what you are looking for, either specific articles,
or a broad search. We will now see how to perform a broad search to start researching on a topic.
 Type in the keywords for the topic here

Change the search field

here to “Document Type”
So that we can then
specify “Review Articles”

We are going to try and find a “review” article on the topic of Addiction and Dopamine.
Review articles are special types of articles where a section of the literature is synthesised and put together. This makes it
easy to find things for other researchers and also provides a great introduction to the main findings in a field of study.
Therefore, a review article is the best place to start when you are new to the field.
 First: scroll down the different
options for document types
until you find “Review”. Click
on it.
Then: Click Me!

Now that we have specified the Topic and the Document Type, we are ready to search!
*Note: If you have a specific article in mind you can always enter details about the author/year of publication here instead
to go directly to it.
Here is a reminder of what
we put into our search fields

Here are the results of our search.

 Select Review only (there are 917 of them),
leave book chapters unticked.

Notice on the left of the screen that we have lots of options to further refine our search. Under document type we are
told that there are 917 matching review papers, and 23 matching book chapters (which may also be reviews). Lets select
the review papers only and press the “refine” button.
*Note: You could choose to refine your results based on any of the other options.
 Result number 1) Title

4) Times Cited 3) View Abstract

2) Find it Button

Page number

After going through to page 3, the 29th result looks like something useful to my research.
There are a number of things you could do at this point:
1) Click on the article title. This will take you to the article’s entry page in the database to choose what to do [we will click this]
2) Click on the “Find it” button. This allows us to find a fully accessible version of the article [we will do this later]
3) Click “View Abstract” . This will allow us to see a short abstract that summarises the article.
4) Click on the number next to “Times Cited”. In this case it is the number 3. This tells us that there are 3 articles that have
cited/used this article in their own articles. Clicking on this button will take you to a list of these 3 articles. This option is very
useful because it allows you to quickly find experiments that are related to your article of interest [authors will usually cite
articles with related experiments/ideas]
 Click on this “Find it” Button

Clicking on the Title will bring up this record of the article that summarises all the important bits of information you might want
to know.
Now we are going to find a “Full text” version of the article, i.e. the actual contents of the article so that we can read it.
To do this we are going to click on the “Find it” button.
 Full text is available!

We can click “View it”

A new window will pop up with more information from the library. Importantly it gives us the option to find the article.
Note in particular that we are told there is a fulltext version of the article available, and we are told that we can view it. Click
the “View it” tab.
Now click on this link to go to the full text version of the article.
Sometimes you will find more than one link.
 Click
Here.

A new window will pop up with the full text version of the article. You can now read it online.
You may want a pdf copy to save so you can view it later/offline. To do this click on the “Download PDF” button.
You now have access to the pdf!
If you find an interesting study mentioned in this article you can then follow it up by finding the full text version for yourself.
You may want to follow up the article by finding which other articles have cited it [see earlier].