Also known as "setting the scene," an important aspect of this step is to identify and use authoritative, well-established, and trustworthy reference sources. This activity includes the following tasks: locating facts and statistics, exploring key concepts and theories, discovering perspectives, generating themes, and identifying trends.
Recognizing an Information Problem
Databases
Data Citation Index
Research data sets and data studies from a wide range of international data repositories in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities.
SciFinder
Scite
Scopus
Abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources. Selected books, book chapters and technical reports are also indexed.
Web of Science
A multidisciplinary citation index to the journal literature of sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities, Web of Science provides access to current information and retrospective data.
Web of Science (WoS) Research Assistant
Insights
Craft better research questions by using question development frameworks
Searching in the AccessMedicine database
Knowledge Base Articles
Explore a topic of interest with controlled vocabularies
Planning a systematic review
Preliminary topic investigation
Scoping review methods and resources
Searching for alternatives to animal research
Programs
Introduction to Conducting Systematic Reviews
Tools
All of Us Researcher Workbench
Babelmesh
Search MEDLINE/PubMed using medical terms or phrases in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
SWIFT Review
SWIFT-Review (SWIFT is an acronym for “Sciome Workbench for Interactive computer-Facilitated Text-mining”) is a freely available interactive workbench which provides numerous tools to assist with p
Yale MeSH Analyzer
Users can input up to 20 PubMed IDs (PMID) at a time to collect MeSH Subject Headings and Author Keywords for search development.