How Earth and Planetary Science Graduate Students Can Use SciX to Conduct Literature Searches

A literature review is the first step of any new research project in graduate school. Science Explorer (SciX) is a literature search tool that can help you improve your literature review efficiency through curated credible source collections, smart search functions, visualizations of literature statistics, and user-friendly organization. SciX specializes in many scientific disciplines including Earth Science, Planetary Science, Heliophysics, Astrophysics, Biological and Physical Science that relate to NASA goals. As a graduate student in Earth Science and a SciX Ambassador, I am excited to share with you five tips on how SciX transformed my literature review process when starting a new project.

Tip 1: SciX allows you to search keywords in the abstracts, not just the titles, of literature.

When I search for literature on a search engine, my instinct is to type in a keyword of my interest such as “Antarctica snowfall on sea ice”. When I do this, many platforms only search for these keywords in journal article titles and return those whose titles seem most relevant. However, a title is only so long, and even if an article has useful information around my keyword, the title might not include all these words exactly.

The abs:"" function of SciX can search my keywords in titles and also in the abstract and keywords sections. For example, I can type in the search bar on SciX abs:(“Antarctica” AND “snowfall” AND “sea ice”), and SciX will go through the titles, abstracts, and keywords of records in the corpus to find the most relevant literature for these topics.

What blew my mind was that SciX actually works with publishers to obtain the full text in their metadata. Although you still often need your own way of access to the full text (for example, through an institutional subscription to a journal), on SciX regardless of institutional access you can search your keyword in the full text of literature using full:"", in a way similar to abs:"".

Tip 2: SciX can help you expand your literature search from the one paper given to you by your advisor.

It’s happened to me often that my advisor would give me one paper that they think is important literature to read for my research topic. Or sometimes, I would be very inspired by a paper I came across and am curious about the history and current state of art of that topic. In either case, SciX has many great functions for expanding my reading from just one paper.

When I type “Wagner and Eisenman, 2015” in the SciX search bar, I can find the paper my advisor gave me. Here are some functions I would use to expand my search on this paper:

1. useful() is a function that asks what papers are cited by publications most relevant to my topic. In my example, I would type useful(Wagner and Eisenman, 2015) in the search bar, and it will show me what papers are cited by studies like Wagner and Eisenman 2015. These would be the studies that came before Wagner and Eisenman 2015 that this topic built upon. If I type just some keywords rather than metadata associated with a specific paper, it would provide records covering the foundation for this topic that authors cite.

2. reviews() is a function that finds the papers that include citations most relevant to my topic. When I use this function, I am going to find papers that came after Wagner and Eisenman and synthesize or build on top of their research, thus citing this research.

3. trending() shows me the reader community of this topic. I can see what papers on this topic do SciX users read the most. Using this function is like how in your lab group, you might see what else people are reading that you might not have discovered yet.

4. Finally, similar() helps me find papers that have similar content to this one paper I have. SciX compares abstracts and provides a robust way of discovering similar research when I have no idea who else is doing similar research in the field.

Using these four functions, I quickly identified many more papers that are very relevant to my research questions and expanded my one reading assignment to a more comprehensive reading list.

Tip 3: SciX lets you filter authors, which is useful when many people have the same first or last name.

As a graduate student, I often want to search for my advisor’s work or the publishing history of some specific scientists in the field that I am interested in. This would be easy if someone has a unique first and last name (like mine), but more often than not, people can have common first names or last names. Many people, when encountering this issue, would add in keywords in their search, such as “sea ice”, to narrow it down to specific fields. However, this method is not robust as one can be publishing under many topics, and people can still share the same name within the same field.

SciX provides more advanced search filters that can help with the common name issue. First, on the left of the screen, the first filter is authors. If you click the checkbox of certain names, you can limit to or exclude those people. To further narrow down by name, you can click on the small arrow next to the names and expand to people with the same last name and first name initial, so you can distinguish them with their middle names. If someone changed their name throughout their career, you could click on multiple names in the author filter and limit the search results to multiple names.

Another handy filter is institutions. Once you click on this filter, you can see the different institutions of the authors in your search results. If you have someone’s CV or LinkedIn, you can figure out which institutions are relevant and limit the results to authors who are or have been at those institutions. You might want to only look at someone’s publications from their PhD institution, in which case you can limit the search result through the institutions filter.

With both the author and institutions filters, I can quickly narrow my search down to the right author I am looking for.

Tip 4: SciX helps you identify groups of people who publish often under your topic of interest.

My favorite function of SciX has to be their visualization tools for the search results. When I first entered the field, I wanted to identify who was publishing under the topic that I became interested in. The author network visualization generated when I search a certain topic such as “Antarctic Ice Sheet” can show me a color-coded pie-chart of different groups of people who tend to publish together. When I click on the view link overlay option, I can see the authorship collaborations between different groups. This is helpful for me to find out who is publishing often in the group and who collaborates with particular authors. This function can be very helpful when you are applying for graduate school to identify the big contributors in the field. The author network is also a powerful tool when you are trying to find collaborators in a field that you are not familiar with.

Tip 5: SciX helps you keep up-to-date with your research topic.

One piece of advice that I got from a professor was to subscribe to important academic journals in my field so I get email alerts when new articles are published. This works well for topical journals like “The Cryosphere”. However, a lot of papers about the cryosphere are published in journals other than The Cryosphere. Knowing which journals to subscribe to takes experience, and subscribing to journals that publish research involving broad topics including the ones that I’m interested in can make the subscription alerts less productive.

On SciX, I can sign up for weekly or daily alerts that include the results of certain queries. To do this, once I search for specific keywords or authors I click on the little bell button on the top right of all my search results. It will prompt me to receive email notifications when new literature is added to the search result. This is a topic-specific and cross-journal method of keeping up-to-date with the literature of your interest.

Closing

I hope this blog post is helpful for fellow students and researchers to elevate your literature review process and accelerate your research. If you liked this blog post, you might want to check out our tutorials on SciX library to organize your literature, as well as other blog posts about SciX. I hope you have a fun time diving into literature!