Writing a thesis is a nightmare for most of us. Sometimes the task is more daunting than even the actual research work. One is always worried about the mistakes that may creep. Managing of literature and the task of adding references, page no, Table no. , generating index of figures and tables and a plethora of things which seem unmanageable by a single person. However using the tools of the modern day we can make our task a lot simpler.

So for any Researcher the following tools are indispensable:

1. Google Scholar: Google Scholar is Google for scientific articles. Everyone knows the power of Google as it comes to web searching and trust me Google Scholar is as powerful. It offers a major boost to the way we search. This is quite useful when we want to write a literature review which needs gathering of lot of articles and Google Scholars helps us both in Quantity and Quality of the research articles we get.

   (P.S. Through Google Scholar if you are lucky enough you can get PAID articles for FREE!!!)

   Read more about Google Scholar here

    

2. Zotero: Zotero is a free citation/ reference manager. What it does? It makes an electronic list of all the articles we search and save. Also it enables to make note for every article. But wait that is not what we use Zotero for. Zotero is used to manage references. It helps us to use these references in our articles and also generate the references section (Bibliography at the end). All this is done without the need of numbering the articles or worrying about formatting each and every individual reference. What if you have formatted references in a particular way and your mentor/guide says “Hey the Author names should be italicized not bold“. With Zotero it’s just a matter of few minutes.

   (P.S. I had formatted about 200 references in less than 30 minutes using Zotero + Google Scholar)

3. Microsoft Word: Though people might wonder what is so special about Word, there are many features you could use to make article/thesis writing a breeze. The most useful being auto generating of List of Contents, List of Tables, and List of Figures. It saves us the effort of remembering numbers of tables/figures so that when phrases such as “as evident from TABLE??” crop up word automatically fills it. And most importantly the advanced formatting offers us with a good lot of control over the look and feel of the thesis.

   Suppose you wonder “what if my font size for all headings was increased a bit and they were underlined would it be nice?”. With Word it’s a matter of seconds.

More articles on how to use these resources are coming up. So keep watching our website or subscribe to our Facebook page…

Google has redefined the way we use the internet. It has also simplified the way we search for scientific articles and journals. Thanks to “Google Scholar”. Below we try to answer some of the basic questions you may have about using Google Scholar

Q.1) What is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar is Google’s search engine exclusively for Students and Research people who search for scientific journals and articles

Q.2) Why should i use Google Scholar?

Unlike most other databases (Sciencedirect, Elsevier) which confine themselves to a selected journals, Scholar searches across all the databases and journals. If a article was published it should be on Google Scholar.

Q.3) Is it free?

Yes like all other products of Google, this is a free service Click here Google Scholar

Q.4) Can i download paid articles from Google Scholar?

As earlier said Google is just a search engine. Your ability to download article depends on the subscription you / your college has. Most Universities have integrated Google Scholar and you can directly search and download articles directly from the college website.

Q.5) What about the free articles?

Free/ opensource articles / articles without copyright restrictions can be directly downloaded through Google Scholar.

Q.6) How will this really benefit me?

Google scholar uses the same technology as Google search. So the advantages

• You need not remember the EXACT name of the author/ article. Spelling mistakes are allowed and Google corrects you 🙂
• Searching for articles is a breeze. (Trust me i have used ScienceDirect , Pubmed, Springer and what not). It is the fastest method.
• You can save your searches

Q.7) Does Google Scholar work with EndNote?

Google Scholar works seamlessly with almost all the citation managers including  Zotero , Mendeley, EndNote, Refman etc etc etc. And you can directly import citations into these reference managers/ citation managers.

Excited? Give Google scholar a try at scholar.google.com

You will never want to Go back …

More articles coming up:

1. What is Zotero and how should i use it?

2. Using Zotero and Google Scholar together.

3. How to gather resources for a research article using Zotero?

4. How to format references for my thesis/ article?

More Information about Google Scholar can be found at these resources

1. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/articles/google-scholar/

EMBASE,PUBMED, MICROMEDEX, NAPRALERT, PHARMAGKB are some of the popular pharmaceutical databases. Lets have a quick look at their services.

1. EMBASE
A very rich source of biomedical information from Elsevier Lifescience Solutions, EMBASE is a comprehensive database which is used by a majority of biomedical researchers worldwide. It allows the tracking and retrieval of information regarding diseases and drugs ranging for pre-clinical studies to important and critical information on toxicological studies. There are over 25 million records that are indexed with EMBASE and all of these have been taken from hundreds of peer reviewed journals. If you are in search of up to date information for your research, EMBASE is your likely destination.

Students, educators, physicians, pharmacists, information managers, clinicians and medical librarians are regular users of EMBASE because of its wide and in-depth coverage of data. It is a very good resource for especially those who are into clinical research and pharmacovigilance.

2. PubMed
A free to use database, maintained by the United States National Library of Medicine at National Institutes of Health, PubMed provides access to references on biomedical and life sciences information. It primarily accesses the MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, a.k.a MEDLARS online) database which has information collected from academic journals of pharmacy, nursing, medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine and health care. It is a very widely used database to access full text articles which are freely available.

3. MICROMEDEX
This is another very important and widely used database by researchers from various domains. It is a product of Truven Health Analytics which is a very trusted brand in evidence based medicine references. It provides well referenced information on diseases, drugs, toxicology, alternative medicine, acute care etc to healthcare practitioners for making precise diagnosis and treatment plans.
One very unique service called the PDR Electronic Library is specifically targeted towards providing information on drugs approved by the FDA which includes side effects, drug interactions, recommended dosages, contraindications and much more.

Click here to know more about the usefulness of MICORMEDEX for Pharmacists.

4. NAPRALERT
If you are into natural product research, you will face some difficulties while searching for quality information as there are very few indexed resources which provide good information about traditional medicine. However, NAPRALERT has been a big boon for phytochemists and pharmacologists who are into testing of natural products as it is high on precise information about natural products which includes ethnopharmacology, biochemical and pharmacological information on extracts of organisms in situ, in vitro, in vivo as well as in humans.

As of today, NAPRALERT houses more than 200,000 reviews and research papers from all over the globe and also covers marine natural products. Ethnomedicinal information on almost 20,000 species is also available, which is a very rare achievement.

5. PharmaGKB
It stands for Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase and is yet another database which is hardly known to researchers in the pharmaceutical field, but is very sophisticated in terms of the information provided. It is a very good soruce of information on genomic, genetic, cellular and molecular phenotype data and clinical records from people who have been a part of pharmacogenomic research studies. It has data pertaining to more than 3000 diseases, almost 20,000 genes and 2500 drugs as well as 53 pathways. Very useful for researchers in understanding the effect of genetic makeup in producing different reactions to drugs in different individuals.

Researchers are advised to visit these databases to collect latest biomedical information. We will keep posting about more pharmaceutical databases.