Searching

I often come across colleagues who do not know how to discover literature on their topic. I do not know how people get themselves into the situation that they feel they have no access to papers or databases. Perhaps they are looking no further than the shelves of their own local library, or maybe they are part-time or distance students doing the research without accessing the guidance available to researchers about how to access materials in their University library. First, before casting around and writing to odd authors seeking copies of their papers, please check your own University website. Personally, I feel that it is a waste of everyone’s time to request a copy of an article from its author when your own library already has electronic access to the journal in question. I would guess that 99% of the requests I get for a PDF of one of my papers could be avoided. I tend to check the enquirer’s university library website by searching for the title of the journal and, usually, research students in this topic already have subscriptions to electronic versions of the main journals in the field. Requesting a PDF from an author should be the last option, not the first.

Even if a particular library does not have access to a specific journal or article, there is often a much larger range of resources available than one may imagine, often with access to the full-text of the papers. For example:

• ARCOM CM Abstracts – A free-to-access database of information from journals within the construction management area, as well as PhD theses and ARCOM Conference proceedings (full-text).
• CIB Iconda library – a comprehensive library of full-text conference proceedings and data from a wide range of journals on all aspects of construction.
• Mendeley – A social networking site based on bibliographies and crowd-sourcing algorithms that suggest papers based on what you identify as being relevant. A powerful tool for sharing bibliographies and finding people and articles within your topic. This is not restricted to construction management, but cuts across all academic disciplines.

And then there are University repositories where the full-text of papers may be made available free, on-line. This is often because national research councils insist that if public money is used to fund research, then the results of that research should be freely available. With open access publishing, this is not a problem, because if there are any charges for open access journals, the author pays, not the reader. However, what many fans of open access often overlook is that commercial publishers do not seek to own the copyright on academic authors’ original work. They only seek to own the copyright in the published version that they invested effort into. This means that you can usually get a copy of what was accepted for publication, even if it does not look the same as the published version. These can be found in the on-line repositories of the University in which the author worked at the time of publication. So if you can see the author’s name and institution, you should be able to get hold of the full text from a repository. And if you cannot see a version in a University’s repository, most authors will glad send you a copy if you drop them a line.

So, in summary, there is an enormous amount of information freely available to researchers, wherever they are.