Setting your Google Scholar Preferences: Jasper's Xmas tip number 10

Why not just use Google to find information?
 

Problems with just googling information include not seeing all the information, data and literature available. You need to search in various places to get a good impression of work already done on your topic. Jasper recommends searching for scholarly information on Google Scholar

It is advisable to set your Google Preferences in Settings before you start, to make sure you do not miss out on full text links to Cambridge subscribed electronic resources e.g. journal articles. To do so click on the three lines at the top left of the Google Scholar screen to open up the Google Scholar menu - scroll right to the bottom to Settings

From the Settings Menu go to the Library Links option, third option down the list.

Type "University of Cambridge" into the search box and tick the boxes for 

University of Cambridge - ejournals@cambrigde

Open WorldCat Library Search

Make sure you turn on cookies to retain settings on your devices and then click the blue Save button.

Now when you search Google Scholar if Cambridge has access to the articles that come up you will be able to click straight through for Full Text Access!

Using My Favourites lists when searching iDiscover on a keyword, topic or theme - Jasper's Xmas tips number 8

 If you are doing a literature search on a topic, e.g. Labour economics and crime for a project did you know you can use IDiscover like a database to search by keyword, topic or theme? Then you can use My Favourites in iDiscover to save your searches for later or to help you with your references.

Do a search on your keywords: labour, economics, crime in iDiscover under Articles and online resources

You will see that you get a large number of results, over 14,000 - so it is a good idea to refine or filter your results using the right hand side menus. You could choose Peer-reviewed Journals, Articles, and refine the publications to recent dates e.g. 2018-2022

Then you could start looking at the titles of the articles and deciding if they are useful for your project. As long as you have logged in you can use the little pin symbol next to each article you are interested in reading or saving to save your readings to a list 

Clicking on the pins next to articles collects them under the pin next to your name at the top right hand side of the screen 

Clicking on this pin will then bring up your list of saved readings

From here you can tick the records you want to save, print, email or download and export the reference details by using the three dots at the top to open a menu of options

Or you can sort your list into labelled lists by using the Add Labels link at the top of My Favorites

Once you have added labels they will appear at the right hand side e.g.

Really useful for organising your literature review for your project or dissertation!!!