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Library services for researchers - Conducting your research

Managing your research 

Effective management of your research is crucial to ensure your work is comprehensive, systematic and efficient. You should consider documenting your searches, managing the references of literature you find, and setting up database search and journal alerts once you have settled on a search strategy and have built your discipline knowledge regarding journals. 

Documenting your searches

It's good practice to document and save your search results and methods for how you found your information. By saving your search results in one place, you'll be able to re-run, edit or share your results and strategies with other people and keep a thorough record of your review process.

The UOW Literature Review Search Tracker is a spreadsheet template to help you plan, organise and retrieve your search strategies across multiple databases.

Managing your references

Reference management, or bibliographic management, software can be used to help you: 

  • Store and organise references relating to your research and writing 
  • Generate citations and bibliographies in your preferred referencing style directly into Word documents 
  • Maintain academic integrity and avoid plagiarism. 

There are a number of different options when it comes to reference management software. You can download and use EndNote for free through the UOW licence, or you can use other reference management software in similar ways. 

The referencing and citing guide provides a range of support materials to assist you.

Alerts for researchers

Alerts for researchers are automatic updates of new information added to journal databases and websites. They are available from the Library's subscription databases, publisher's websites and are sent by email or RSS feed.

Setting up alerts will keep you informed of the latest publications in your research area, save time and effort, find out about new research data, across multiple databases and platforms, and identify new areas of potential research. 

There are three types of alerts for researchers:

Journal alerts, or Table of Content (TOC) alerts, provide a convenient and systematic way of keeping up with the latest issues of journals relevant to your research. Some examples are linked here, or use the help pages of individual journals or databases to locate instructions on how to subscribe.

Search alerts, available from most databases, provide you with newly published works based on your specific search strategy in databases and Library SEARCH. 

Citation alerts when a specific article has been cited or when a new paper is published by an author you are interested in.  

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