Fellow scientists! I need your help!

I’ve recently been discussing and writing about scientific issues that are slightly tangental to my day job. Only slightly mind, with the upshot that I’ve been doing literature searches where I’m not just updating my knowledge – I’m finding out new stuff. The kind of thing where even defining a search term a priori is difficult.

I know, I know, welcome to climate science, Doug.

I’d really like not to miss anything important, and it strikes me that this becomes more difficult as climate science (and science in general) becomes more atomized, the publication rate goes up, and we simply find out more stuff.

My own literature search strategy has relied heavily on a) Google Scholar, b) asking very knowledgeable colleagues, and c) a bit of luck. Option a) recently failed me slightly, which meant that I had to rely on b) and c).

So my question is: 

What is your best literature search strategy?

Or if you haven’t much time:

What is your best literature search resource?

This might just be one of the perils of interdisciplinary research – not everything you need to know gets published in a few easy-to-search journals. Google scholar is good, because it shows you what cites a paper, and often leads to pdf copies (important if you’re not working in a university).

Leave a comment if you like, or tweet me @dougmcneall

Thanks.

ps, “I’m an AR5 author, and simply get everyone to send me their brilliant new stuff” doesn’t count 🙂