WISER Finding Stuff

1. WISER Finding Stuff Conferences James Shaw and Sue Bird

2. Conferences allow you to:

3. Finding conferences

4. Tools for gathering information E-MAIL ALERTS

5. General Websites:

6. Societies and Organizations

7. Web 2.0 tools for monitoring conferences

8. Finding conferences

9. Finding Published Output

10. Finding proceedings • Often difficult because of variety of ways of publishing • May be no Proceedings, but selected papers published separately • No comprehensive listing • Check: • Library catalogues • Organisation’s websites • Conference databases • Subject databases • People who went

11. Locating conference papers • If you are given a reference to a conference paper that doesn’t mean it was necessarily published! • Recent papers might be on web – try searching on the paper title, author, organisation name or the conference name • Sometimes you can quite easily track down the author and they will send you a copy • If published conference papers are not available in Oxford the Library Services can usually get hold of it for you through inter-library loan

12. Searching library holdings in Oxford University • When searching SOLO for a conference paper you need to search for the proceedings of the conference rather than the specific paper • Conferences are treated as corporate authors • Published proceedings may have different title to the original • Publisher may be different from conference organiser

13. SOLO • SOLO has no option to limit by document type so you need to use keyword search and include ‘proceedings’ ‘conference’, ‘symposium’ etc as keywords alongside subject terms • Most conferences in the collections will have a Subject Heading which includes ‘Congresses’ • So best search for keyword(s) in titles and subjects, and for Congresses in LC Subjects, e.g:

18. Other Library catalogues • See OXLIP+ under Library Catalogues • Especially useful for UK is COPAC or British Library Catalogue • You can ask for Inter-library loan of identified conferences

19. Conferences at the British Library • The British Library catalogue can be limited to just conferences • The ZETOC service – http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ provides access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents. This database contains details of approximately 20,000 current journals and 16,000 conference proceedings published per year. • Almost 15 million article and conference records • Use the ZETOC Alerting service (via O.S.S.)

20. British Library • The British Library integrated catalogueincludes over 400,000 conference proceedings on a variety of subjects • Go to the British Library integrated catalogue home page • Choose "Search the integrated catalogue" • Click “Catalogue subset search” from the top bar • Then choose “Document Supply Conferences” from the list.

24. Google & Google Scholar • Use Google for locating announcements of forthcoming conferences • No controlled vocabulary, so search for ‘conference’ and also synonyms – meeting, symposium, congress etc • Prefer Google Scholar for conference papers

30. Conference Paper Indexes • CPCI – Conference Proceedings Citation Index – now incorporated into Web of Science • Conference Papers Index – available through CSA Illumina • PapersFirst and ProceedingsFirst – available through OCLC FirstSearch • Find all these via OxLIP+

31. Conference Proceedings Citation Index CPCI covers only publications in which the proceedings are published for the first time, and only those which contain complete papers, not just abstracts. • Coverage includes international proceedings, and is not limited to those in the English language, (currently 110,000+ proceedings). • Published proceedings may be included from a number of sources; books or series produced by publishers or societies, reports, sets of preprints (when preprints are the only publications from a conference) or journals. • More than 12,000 conferences added annually – some 5.2 million papers in total.

35. Conference Papers Index (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts) This database provides citations to papers and poster sessions presented at major scientific meetings. • Information is derived from final programs, abstracts booklets and published proceedings, as well as from questionnaire responses. • Records include complete ordering information to obtain preprints, abstracts, proceedings and other publications derived from the conference, plus title & author information needed to track the specific papers. • Available through OxLIP+

39. PapersFirst • OCLC index of papers presented at conferences worldwide • Covers every published congress, symposium, conference, exposition, workshop and meeting received by The British Library Document Supply Centre. • Database details • SubjectsThe wide variety of subjects discussed at the covered meetings. • Sources Included in each record. • Number of records: Over 6,500,000 • Dates covered: 1993 to present • Updated: Semimonthly (twice a month) • Available through OXLIP+ (search title index or under general bibliographic tools)

40. Proceedings First [OCLC] • Covers every published congress, symposium, conference, exposition, workshop and meeting received by The British Library Document Supply Centre. • Contains in each record a list of the papers presented at each conference. • Subjects: conference proceedings, meetings, congresses, symposia, exhibitions, workshops • Sources Included in each record. • Number of records: 192,000+ • Dates covered: 1993 to present • Updated: Semiweekly (twice a week) • Available through OXLIP+ • and search title index or under general bibliographic tools

44. Subject databases Most subject-specific bibliographic databases include conference papers and proceedings Find those relevant to your subject via OxLIP+ Some databases will allow you to limit by conference as document typeeg: SCOPUS ; Historical Abstracts OpenSIGLE : System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe PAIS International (Public Affairs, Development, etc.) (via CSA Illumina)

49. Repositories • Institutional and subject-based repositories being developed Oxford: Oxford Research Archive http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/ Search them via: OAIster http://www.oaister.org (or via OxLIP+) Google / Google Scholar SCIRUS http://www.scirus.com (or via OXLIP+)