Browsing academic e-library - a brief note

Students doing assignments and dissertation reports need to get some inspirations on topic areas and topic themes; when doing literature review, again, students need to do e-library search. From my experience, solely relying on the search engine of e-library is not good enough. There must be some exploration effort involved and that e-library search engines ae not very powerful, in my view. I suggest that you visit some of the major academic publishers, such as Emerald or Wiley direct to do some browsing of academic journals. Exploring academic e-library is a very useful practical skill. [Try to make sure you can access university e-library after you graduate from your university. The major steps to do e-library browsing are shown in following diagrams, which are self-explanatory [your university e-library interface could be slightly different from that of my example though the feature of single sign on remains the same]:

Diagram 1: After you log into your university e-library with your user id and password, you should see a screen likes this

Diagram 2

Diagram 3

Diagram 4

Diagram 5

Diagram 6

Once you have downloaded some "interesting" articles, you could browse through the articles' abstracts to pick up some topic areas and issues that are of interest to you; as you continue with your browsing process, you try to develop your own assignment/ dissertation proposal themes and concerns. In the process, you will decide to spend more time to actually study some of the articles, not just browsing through these articles' abstracts.

In this example, I use Emerald as the academic publisher's website to study; you could try others, such as Wiley. Obviously, for literature review purpose, you also need to study some reference books and articles downloaded from the Internet via google search.

I find it useful to use a ebook, such as Amazon's kindle, to do the reading in this case, instead of printing out all the articles to study.