LTH PhD Students Introduction Guide

​​Benefits of planning a search

• It results in retrieving relevant references
• It avoids missing key references
• It results in retrieving a manageable number of hits
• It uses time efficiently 

Why use databases?

• Quality checked information
• Ordered structure of the database
• The ability to search in a structured fashion
• Specialist content - Indexed and subject classified information
• Information clearly defined in each database. You know what sources are indexed and searched and from when 

Are search engines your only go to when you are searching? We dare you to go beyond regular search engines 

When it comes to regular search engines there are issues of

• Hidden information - the hidden web
• Quality of information 
• Quantity of information 
• Limited search options
• Not able to know what specific sites are being searched, cannot determine how comprehensive

Many people begin searching for information in Google or Google Scholar. In doing so, they are missing the deeper indexing functionality of many databases along with various options to save or download the results. Researchers are better served reviewing the records from a database with deeper indexing, knowing that each citation has “Algorithms” assigned as a Controlled Vocabulary term.