Discover

Advanced:  These are more advanced skills expected to be developed by the end of the third year of an undergraduate programme, for example.

Advanced skills really start to increase your confidence and ability to discover the key resources you need for your assignments at a higher level of study.  You may be thinking about and planning for your Independent Study or Dissertation and this is a time when your advanced skills really come in to play, enabling you to examine a subject in more depth and find the essential resources efficiently and effectively.

In addition to the skills you've already developed you should be able to:

• Independently carry out advanced, effective searches across multiple, relevant subject databases to find appropriate academic information.
   
• Understand and use the full range of functionality within those databases.  For example using truncation, wildcards, date limits, subject headings (where available) etc.
   
• Judge when to modify your search strategy as needed and know when to use alternative databases.
   
• Use citation searching to expand your literature searches.  This involves investigating additional sources citing and cited by the original papers of interest to you.
   
• Know when to stop searching.
   
• Make use of external services such as Inter Library Loans and the SCONUL Access Scheme.