Research Guides: Analysis and Visualization Tools: 2. Discovery

2. Discovery

In this phase, literature searches are conducted and organised in order to define and refine the scope of the research topic. Activities such as searching for paper, getting access to full text, setting alerts to new article, and managing the references are common during this phase.

Watch Aaron Tay , Data services Lead at SMU Libraries give a 1.5 hour overview of common and not so common search techniques (techniques for finding review papers, citation pearl growing etc ) and cutting edge discovery and literature mapping tools such as scite, Connectedpapers, ResearchRabbit and more.(sign in with SMU smu credentials to watch).

Search Tools

Librarian's take on search tools
With the explosion in open access, open data and advancements in machine learning and deep learning, there have been many new search and discovery tools emerging. Besides traditional keyword search based databases, publisher platforms and search engines like JSTOR, Scopus, Web of Science, Econlit, Psycinfo, ScienceDirect etc (consult your research librarian for discipline specific help!) , we have curated other cross-disciplinary discovery tools that our librarians have found helpful to complement the traditional keyword based search tools. Have questions? Ask us!

SMU Libraries' Research Guides by disciplines
The Research Guides is a knowledge portal of key resources tied to various disciplines and modules at SMU. Some of the key guides:
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is one of the most popular web academic search engine that indexes various formats of scholarly literature from various disciplines. It is the largest source of academic literature in one place.
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It's has a lot of full text indexed and as such is one of the few academic search engines or database that allows full-text matching in most items. Add and excellent relevancy algos , quick indexing update and a set of well-chosen features like search alerts, this is a must-use for most researchers. Still it might be a good idea to pair this with a few discipline specific databases or indexing services like Pubmed (medical), Psycinfo (Psychology), Econlit (Economics) etc to cover all the bases.
Browzine
Browzine is a platform that allows you to browse, read, and monitor the online journals that are available from the SMU Libraries. Use this if you have favourite journal titles you always scan/read. Check out the how-to guides by SMU Libraries here
Scite
scite is a discovery platform for scholarly articles. It is well known for its Smart Citations feature that can provide the context of the citation and a classification describing whether it provides supporting or contrasting evidence for the cited claim.
Watch the recorded training session on scite here
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You can also search within citation statements to see what experts on saying about various topics.
Semantic Scholar
An alternative to Google Scholar and scite. This provides powerful semantic search features, including summarized articles and citation types classified by whether cites are for "citing background", "citing methods", "citing results".
Lens.org
A free academic search engine that combines large amounts of available open metadata and serves as an alternative to Google Scholar. Unlike Google Scholar which has limited filtering options, Lens.org has the most grainular filters available in any academic search.
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Another selling point about Lens.org is a best in class set of visualizaton options and the functionality to export up to 50K records in one batch with compares well to traditional databases like Scopus and Web of Science
ASReview
For systematic review - ASReview is open-source software that leverages a machine learning technique called "active learning" to help you screen hundreds of articles for their relevance to your topic.
Read the Research Radar article on ASReview here
SnowGlobe
SnowGlobe is a program that assists with literature searching, using a technique called snowballing. This process takes all known relevant papers and searches through their references (which papers they cite) and citations (which papers cite them).
Library Extension
Library extension is a browser extension that lets you quickly see the availability of books and ebooks on your preferred libraries such as SMU Libraries or NLB. The extension will show the availability info when you browse book titles in Amazon, Goodreads, Google Books, and publisher websites.

Literature Mapping Tools

Librarian's take on Literature Mapping Tools
While searching with keywords is quick and easy to grasp. It is often not easy to figure out what the right keyword is, if you are new to field or if the areas is new and jargon has not been agreed upon. A way to bypass this issue partly is to find related ot similar papers using citation relationships. Below are some of the easiest and best tools that can help you create litertaure maps using selected "seed" papers. This is a new developing area, so watch this space!

Connected Papers
A new simple tool that will help you find papers similar to a particular work that you specify, and then present their connection in a visual graph. All you need is to input one relevant 'seed' paper. The free version is limited to just creating 5 graphs per month.
Read the Research Radar article on Connected Papers here
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Simple and easy to use. Use the "Derivative Works" function to find review papers.
ResearchRabbit
ResearchRabbit is a new 2020 literature mapping tool that can help you find related papers based on references, citations, co-authors, and other linkages.
Read the in-depth Research Radar article on ResearchRabbit here
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Use this to quickly drill down and find related papers by repeated citation chaining. Intergrates well with Zotero . Similar to Litmaps , this also provides good collaboration features.Might be a bit complicated to use.
Litmaps
Litmaps help you find relevant papers and visualize their connection in a network graph, to see how the research topics fit together.
Read the Research Radar article on Litmaps here
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Similar to ResearchRabbit , this also provides good collaboration features.
Inciteful
Inciteful is a literature mapping tool that could help you find similar papers based on a set of papers of your choice. You can also enter two papers and look at all the papers that link those two papers together.
Read the Research Radar article on Inciteful here

Fulltext Tools

Found an article or report behind a paywall? Here are three main research productivity tools that will help you seamlessly access full-text e-resources subscribed by the Libraries through your web browser. Click on the links below to learn more about how they work:

LibKey Nomad
A browser extension that enables you to gain direct access to full-text articles subscribed by SMU Libraries no matter where you go. It will also help you do interlibrary loan to get the item for you if SMU does not subscribe to the item. Check out the how-to guides by SMU Libraries here
Google Scholar Button
A free browser extension that leverages the power of Google Scholar to allow you to find full text by either linking you to the SMU subscribed copy or free open copy on most pages.
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This is a powerful tool, however you must remember to press the button to activate it on each page. The other tools in this category automatically activate.
Endnote Click (formerly Kopernio)
Another freemium tool similar to Libkey Nomad to help you access full text via SMU subscriptions or legal open free copies. Some additional features includes a cloud locker to store your files (with limits), predatory journal checks.
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Less popular and not officially supported by SMU Libraries.

Reference Management Tools

Need to keep track and cite a large number of papers? Need to insert these citations into your paper or manuscript with a single click in any known citation style? Need to change these citations to fit another journal's style with a single click? You need a citation or reference manager! Here are some popular ones.

Zotero
Zotero is a popular free and open-source bibliographic/citation management software that helps with managing and organizing references. Zotero is a good choice if your references include a wide variety of formats. The Zotero community have built various add-ons that you can download to get more features and enhancements, such as DOI manager, PMID fetcher, etc.
Check out the how-to guides by SMU Libraries here
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Zotero being open source integrates very well with scite , Researchrabbit and other search tools above.
Endnote
Clarivate's EndNote is one of the first bibliographic management software on the market. Like other reference manager it helps to manage and organize references, insert in-text citations and generate appropriate reference lists. The desktop version requires a paid license to use, and it comes with unlimited storage and a variety of features that's useful to manage references for long-term research projects (e.g. built-in PDF annotation).
Check out the how-to guides by SMU Libraries here
Mendeley
Elsevier's Mendeley is a free reference management software that could help you to collect, organize, tag, and annotate references and inserts them into word documents. One of its popular feature is the built-in PDF annotation, which is useful if you prefer to keep all your references, annotations, and notes in one place. Mendeley also comes with collaborative functions where you can share your reference collection with others.
Scholarcy Reference Extractor
This tool can help you extract the references in a PDF and save it as RIS or BibText format. You can use cURL or simply use the interactive documentation (click on "Try it out" on the first tab and input the permalink to your PDF). While it can retrieve the references with relatively high accuracy, be sure to double check the result for missing references.

Translation Tools

DeepL
DeepL is a machine translation service. It currently supports 28 languages only, but it generally provides better translation accuracy than Google Translate especially for European languages. You can also directly upload a PDF or DOC file to the web service.