How to get better search keyword in Science Direct

March 18, 2011 iPai 6 Comments

Salam

Having trouble in getting information that you want in Science Direct ? The results were not the field that you expected ?

Hye. Today, I will share a technique in searching keyword for your thesis writing. Maybe some of us is already know about this technique and for those who do not know, this will help you in finding the information that you want. You will need this for your thesis writing, and term paper writing.

Before we go further, some introduction about Science Direct. Science Direct is an information source for scientific, technical, and medical research. There are a lot of scientific sites other than Science Direct, such as Scopus, but maybe I like Science Direct more because it's user friendly. And you need to pay and subscribe to use.

Now, back to our main topic, to have a better understanding, we will have a example. And for that, I will use topics in my thesis to delivered the technique. Ok let say;

Preparation of Activated carbon from palm oil shell

First of all, you might want to highlight the important keyword for your first and second search. From the Topic you gets;

1. Activated carbon

2. Palm oil shell

Then, go to the search bar and type the first keyword;

And it will give you the results;

Ok for those super hardworking they can try to read all the 192 092* journals and filter the one that they want to use. Or you can just use this next step. The next step is to utilize the toolbar located on the left hand side of the monitor, which help you to filter or search deeper in your current lists.

You can search within your results list, or you can refine your results. You can Limit to the keyword that you typed or exclude which one you do not need. You can, refine the results according to the content type, the journal/book title, topic and year.

So, you can typed you second keyword;

And the results that you get is 954* articles

Ok, you may now read some of the journal. You will get some of the overview of the topics and plan your structure for your thesis. Thus, the next keyword will be type in, e.g steam.

The activated carbon can be produced through physical activation in which using the CO2 and steam. So the next keyword search is 'steam'. The activation keyword might give us the unwanted results because the activation keyword will cover the chemical activation and CO2 activation. So, just pick specific word only that can help you narrow it. Next keyword

3. Steam

So now you have 446* articles list.

Let say currently, I am searching for BET surface area of the activated carbon from plam oil shell which undergo the steam activation. So we can go to the refine results toolbar and limit to BET surface area;

4. Limit to BET Surface area