How to search

Unfortunately, from this point forward the difficulties emerge. Generally speaking, searching in aggregators doesn’t resemble google search and its relevancy is limited to just 3 or 4 results. Furthermore, publications on such aggregators are frequently not available for free. But it is possible to resolve all these problems.

Let’s imagine that you need to acquaint yourself with the topic of the research of products aimed at preschoolers.

The first goal is to find at least one article related to our topic.

Let’s use ResearchGate — https://www.researchgate.net/search/

The search results aren’t particularly relevant. I can’t be absolutely certain but it looks like SP search engines make a search by the article headline exclusively and rarely search by the contents of the abstract. Moreover, the exact match of each word is checked during this process. That’s why it’s necessary to simplify your query. For example, “preschoolers” can be replaced with “children” and, probably, the word “usability” can be removed. In this case, you’ll get many articles that are not related to research in the field of UX, but they will be related to children in one way or another.

That’s why the first objective is to confine the publications to the topic of interest. But ResearchGate can’t do it. That’s why I recommend visiting acm.dl.

Let’s search CHI reports, for example — https://dl.acm.org/topic/conference-collections/chi. The same process can be repeated when searching any of the journals dedicated to a narrow area of expertise.

Don't use a general search box

but an advanced search:

Now you can be sure that the results of your search will be related to HCI in some way.

Then study the headlines of each article and look at the summary. At this stage, it is important to understand if the research objectives are related to the topic of your interest.

This looks like the very thing you’ve been looking for.

Unfortunately, there’s no access to the article but there are the most important things available: authors, the headline or “doi”.

Now let’s copy the headline and “doi” and make a search on ResearchGate.

Now you can see that the article is available.

In case the article isn’t available on ResearchGate or access to the article is denied, you can google the headline. Often the articles are available for free on the websites of universities.

There is another method if google didn’t return the results. There are emails of the authors on the aggregator websites. You can try to email authors and explain that you’re interested in the topic:

Can I request the code behind a research paper from the author? https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/26159/can-i-request-the-code-behind-a-research-paper-from-the-author

How can I send requesting email to the researcher for their research articles? https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-send-requesting-email-to-researcher-for-their-research-articles.

There is also a discussion from the “opposite” side:

Can we send published papers to those who request it? https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_we_send_published_paper_to_those_who_request_for_it

It’s also worth to give a read:

I requested a paper from an author via e-mail, but no response. Any clues as to why? https://www.researchgate.net/post/I_requested_a_paper_from_an_author_via_e-mail_but_no_response_Any_clues_as_to_why

I’m not experienced at communicating with the authors, so I can’t recommend better solutions than those provided in the references above. But in one case out of three, I was sent an article and even recommended other authors for reading. In two other cases, I just didn’t receive any reply.

So you’ve found the first article and studied it. But it’s too early to make conclusions about an understanding of the topic on the basis of just one article. You need more and you have them!

You can refer to the “past”. Every scientific publication is preceded by the studying of works of other authors. And you can find more options in the section of the references to the literature. In this specific case, we have a jackpot — 69 references.

But other than that, you can also refer to the “future” — citation. If an article was available in the journals for some time, the other authors may have borrowed ideas from it and develop upon them.

On aggregator websites on the page of a publication, there is a Citations section, where all works of the authors who referred to the article are collected.

For example, Hick’s work “On the rate of gain of information” was cited 1720 times.

But this is just a list of citations that are available in the Scinapse database and it can be incomplete. That way, for example, according to the research of Brysbaert (2016) Hick’s work was cited 1119 times only within the framework of Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. So if you need a full picture you’d better double-check citations using different search engines.

Now you are able to make more reasonable conclusions about the topic if after studying the previous and the subsequent publications you reach theoretical saturation. If you still think that you don’t have enough information, you can repeat the recursion for any other work that you’re interested in from the list of references and citations.

That’s about it. Good luck with searching!