Help with LitFinder
Tips for more successful searching
What is LitFinder?
LitFinder is WZB's new search engine for scientific literature. LitFinder enables you to search simultaneously in tens of thousands of e-journals. Moreover, you will find bibliographical records from databases such as the Web of Science. Whenever possible, you will be offered a link to the full text.
LitFinder contains bibliographic references for almost 200 million journal articles, books, papers, and other media. The standard configuration enables you to directly search for literature which is available online either exclusively at WZB or for free on the Internet.
How do you use LitFinder?
Perform your search, then refine your results.
Refine your search results with the options on the left side of the results screen:
What are the Recommendations about?
LitFinder may suggest a resource which contains a lot of information on your topic, and where you will get better search results by searching it separately. Go to it via the green link in the LitFinder recommendation. You can find direct links to these resources in the our database list.
Tips for more successful searching
Phrase Searching
LitFinder allows for phrase searching with the use of “ ”. The query “international politics” will find results with that phrase.
Boolean Operators
The use of Boolean operations in capital letters can be used to make queries more specific. LitFinder offers the following Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT, +, -. By default, all terms in a search are combined with the AND operator.
To expand the results set, use the OR operator, e. g. handbook OR encyclopedia will return items that contain either term.
This can be combined with phrase searching, e. g. "teacher education” OR “educator training”.
To exclude items in LitFinder, use the NOT operator or - character before a term. When used in the following query animal NOT dog the results will not include the term “dog”.
Wildcard Use
Searches within LitFinder can be performed using the wildcards ? and *.
The question mark ? will match any one character and can be used to find “Olsen” or “Olson” by searching for Ols?n.
The asterisk * will match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. A search for ch*ter would match “charter”, “character”, and “chapter”. When used at the end of a word, such as temp*, it will match all suffixes, e. e. “temptation”, “temple” and “temporary”.
Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search.
Key features
- Use Advanced Search to search by title or author.
- Refine your search by content type, subject, library location or date published.
- Limit your search to articles from scholarly publications
- Hover over the title to preview.
- Sort by relevance or date.
- Click the RSS icon to save your search to your favorite RSS reader (e. g. your browser)
- Click the Save icon to save/export/email results to RefWorks, EndNote, or BibTex with a choice of citation style.
- Click the Full-Text icon to access available online content.
Full text
By clicking the link Full Text Online, the iconor the linked title you will either come directly to the full text or to an intermediate page. There you will find options to get to the full text (“Links to content”) and you will be able to export, to e-mail or simply download the hits in your reference management programs.
If there is no access to the full text you can submit a request at WZB library (purchase or Interlibrary Loan).
A tip:If you want to access only electronic texts, set in the hit list at the top left of the checkbox "Only electronic full-text."
Saved Items
Questions?
If you have any questions, please contact the library.
Phone: 25491 -521
E-mail: bibliothek [at] wzb.eu