Most academic research databases offer similar and familiar search options. Use the "advanced search" link, whenever available, to take advantage of :
Most databases provide convenient options for handling and delivering your selections, allowing you to:
Get the most out of Google Scholar and Google Books by setting your preferences.
Academic book reviews can save you time by giving you an overview of the book's content, pointing to other important works on the topic, and giving you a sense of the disciplinary community's response to recent scholarship. Find them in a disciplinary database, journal platforms, or discovery systems by limiting the source type to reviews and limit results to scholarly or peer-reviewed.
Likewise, annual reviews and literature review articles can give you a head start by giving you an overview of the major research and publications in your field in any given year. These are a good entry point into further research, and lead you to the more significant works more quickly. Try searching your field or discipline plus "annual review" or "review of the literature" in the discovery search. You can also try searching for annual reviews or more granular topics.
Looking at the references cited in an academic publication is a useful way to contextualize the work, and to get leads to other useful items. Another way of using the scholarly practice of citing sources is to look at how an academic publication is cited by others. Cited reference searches used to only be possible using Web of Science. Today, Google Scholar as well as a number of databases and publishers make it possible to do cited reference searching within the content they index. Databases that allow for cited reference searching include Web of Science, Scopus, MLA Bibliography, PsycINFO, Google Scholar, Education Source, and more.
Cited reference searching allows you to: