Yale University Library Research Guides: Orienting Yourself to Linguistics Resources: Resource Tips

Helpful Tips

In Quicksearch, you can search for general topics and narrow down to specific subjects using the facets to the left of your search results. This can limit resources to specific date ranges, languages, locations, online/offline, dissertations, and so on. When you search on library.yale.edu, you will automatically be taken to a screen that shows you what we have in a variety of digital and analog formats. Books+ is where we can search the library catalog, which includes print and electronic books. The Books+ portal link is immediately below the search box on the initial results screen.

In the screenshot, we are starting from Quicksearch itself, not the library homepage. When you visit search.library.yale.edu/catalog, you will be presented with a blank screen on Books+. I want to do a subject search for higher education.

We can use the drop-down menu to the right of the search box to pick what we want to search in the catalog. In this case, we are looking for a subject.

On a record, you can also click on the subject terms assigned to a book relevant to your research. This will help you with digital serendipity by calling up books from across YUL that have those same subject tags.

This book, Linguistic Justice on Campus: Pedagogy and Advocacy for Multilingual Students, has a subject term that can help us locate similar titles.

The subject term above is nested, meaning that the > is representing narrowing down the topic. If we wanted to do a search for American higher education in general, regardless of what the subject hierarchy is, we can use the advanced search.

In the advanced search box, we will look for United States in one box, higher education in another. Writing American instead of United States will match us to subject terms like African American, Asian American, and so on.

The advanced search allows us to put search terms in multiple boxes, each with their own drop-down menu for choosing the aspect we want to search. We are searching subject terms, and we want results published from 2010 to the present.

The search results are below.

The search results for United States higher education as a subject term.

In the old search interface, Orbis, you have a really interesting option that might be helpful to you. Library of Congress call numbers, which appear in either the catalog record or on the print spine (e.g., QK980 C35X 2012), can be searched. These call numbers are based on book topics, and you can locate other materials related to the book of interest to you with this search feature.

The front page of Orbis. In the drop-down menu next to Search, Call Number (LC) is selected. I have entered the first line of a call number into the search box.

Here, I'm searching for LA226, which will show me — in alphabetical order — everything with that subject (higher education). I can use the left and right arrows in the upper right (just above the results) to browse.

Search results in Orbis for the first line of a call number, which shows the items that are tagged with that call number.

While a lot of papers appear in Google Scholar, the Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) is the best place to go if you want to:

Analyze articles' citation performance by author.
View the research performance of a department (usually best done by searching on addresses + institutions).
Discover which papers are associated with a particular grant.
View a two-way citation tree — or, papers cited by a paper plus papers citing a paper.

If you want metrics about social impact, Scopus is actually better — if an article has been shared frequently on social media, Scopus will have a page devoted to that. It also disambiguates authors via its author search (but for common names, it can get difficult and inaccurate).

This is an example of the Metrics (including social media mentions) page for a recently-published article, "On the history, osteology, and systematic position of the Wealden (Hastings group) dinosaur Hypselospinus fittoni (Iguanodontia: Styracosterna)." (2015). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 173(1), pp. 92-189.
Here's O.C. Marsh's author page (the primary one). You can also click View potential author matches to locate his name/affiliation variants to merge with this view. This is a very helpful feature for those working in interdisciplinary contexts.

The Journal Citation Reports (by Clarivate Analytics) will help you determine the performance of your journal articles — and find places where you can submit new papers. Disciplines are often one of the categories. (If this tells you we don't have access, just refresh the page.)

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses: Global (PQDTGlobal) is the world's most comprehensive collection of full-text dissertations and theses. PQDTGlobal includes millions of searchable citations to dissertations and theses from 1861 to the present day together with over a million full-text dissertations that are available for download in PDF format, including most of the dissertations added since 1997 and strong retrospective full-text coverage for older graduate works. It also includes PQDT UK & Ireland content. Access is limited to Yale University
PhdData: The Universal Index of Dissertations in Progress PhdData has citations from several thousand dissertations in progress from various parts of the world.
Directory of History Dissertations Contains 58,854 dissertations that were completed or are currently in progress at 204 history departments in the United States and Canada.
CRL Center for Research Libraries Foreign Doctoral Dissertations
Holds 800,000 dissertations from universities outside the U.S. and Canada. However, only 20,000 of these are cataloged in the database. If you know the exact title of a dissertation and do not find it in the database, CRL recommends searching the CRL Catalog. If the title does not appear in the database or the catalog, contact CRL directly to inquire if it is held.
CRL continues to acquire about 5,000 titles per year from major universities.
Vidyanidhi: Digital Library and E-Scholarship Portal (from India)
Abes: Bibliographic Agency of Higher Education (from France) A search engine that gives access to the descriptive metadata of French doctoral theses, defended or with the status "in preparation".
National Library of Australia Trove A free repository of Australian material, including almost a million Australian theses.
ETDs: Virginia Tech Electronic Theses and Dissertations Digital Library and Archives allows searching for citations and abstracts of over 6,700 theses and dissertations. Free full-text access is provided for over 4,500 of these items.
Dissertation.com Includes over a million unpublished dissertations, as well as over 600 published dissertations turned into books.
Dissertation Express Online version of Dissertation Abstracts from UMI Proquest. Good for US theses. The fastest way to identify and validate a dissertation is to enter the ProQuest publication number. If you don't have this, enter a word or phrase into the search terms field or the author's last name and the first four words of the dissertation title.
E-Theses (from Finland) Includes digital doctoral dissertations from the end of the 1990's onwards and the digital version is available for most of the doctoral dissertations that have been published in the 2000's. Only the summary part of the article-based dissertations is usually available.
EThOS - British Library UK’s national thesis service. Includes over 500,000 doctoral theses, with over 260,000 available in full-text.
Index to Theses ... Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland
The Index to Theses provides total bibliographic control of all theses ever produced by British and Irish universities (1716 to the present). Access is by author, title, university, degree, year, and keyword. Abstracts are included for titles written since 1970. Full text is not provided, but copies of the dissertations may be requested through interlibrary loan.
M.I.T. Theses Contains selected theses and dissertations from all MIT departments. Contains more than 58,000 theses completed at MIT dating as far back as the mid 1800's.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) Provides access to citations from thousands of digital dissertations and theses that are in PDF format. A significant number of these resources are freely available in full-text and can be viewed online.
OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center A free, online database of Ohio's undergraduate, masters and doctoral theses and dissertations from participating OhioLINK member schools. It contains the abstract for all included theses and dissertations. The full-text is also available if it was submitted.
Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD) A free repository of theses, dissertations, and other academic documents, coupled with powerful search, organization, and collaboration tools. Currently indexes 6,420,812 theses and dissertations.
Rutgers Electronic Theses & Dissertations (RUetd) Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) have replaced printed theses and dissertations for most Rutgers graduate programs and are available through RUcore.
HAL Theses Makes scientific documents available to scientists all around the world, rapidly and freely, but with a restriction to PHD thesis and habilitations. Includes over 132,000 full-text submissions.
Theses Canada Portal Provides access to bibliographic citations for all the theses in the National Library of Canada Theses Collection.
Thèses de l'Université de Lyon 2 Searchable database of theses defended in various universities in France and theses produced at the University of Lyon 2.
University of Miami Electronic Theses & Dissertations Preserves and provides access to selected research and scholarly works prepared by faculty, students, and staff of the University of Miami, including dissertations.
WorldCat.com This database provides fast and convenient access to the dissertations and theses available in OCLC member libraries. Many theses are available electronically, at no charge, directly from the publishing institution. The advanced search screen allows you to limit by Content to Thesis/Dissertation under "Format."

What is ORCID?

ORCID provides you with a unique identifier — an Open Researcher and Contributor ID — and a mechanism for linking your research outputs and activities to your ORCID. Yale is an ORCID member.

How is it useful to me?

ORCID is integrated into many systems used by publishers, funders, institutions, and other research-related services. Some publishers now require an ORCID for the primary (or all) co-authors when submitting a paper.

An ORCID …

Distinguishes you and ensures your research outputs/activities are correctly attributed to you.
Reliably and easily connects you with your contributions and affiliations, including employment, funding, scholarly works, and education.
Reduces form-filling — again, many publishers, funders, and research-related services now have ORCID sign-ins and integrations.
Improves recognition and discoverability for you and your research outputs.
Is sometimes required by journal manuscript submission systems and grant application forms.
Is persistent — you can use it throughout your research career.

In addition, if you have a common name or plan to change your name in the future, ORCID can help others find your older papers.

Watch Why ORCID? to learn more: https://vimeo.com/237730655

How do I register?

Go to https://orcid.org/signin. Click Institutional Account and type in Yale University. From here, you can log in with your Yale credentials. If you don’t already have an account, ORCID will guide you through the three-minute account creation process.

Where can I learn more?

Learn more about ORCID at https://orcid.org/help or in the Yale Library ORCID guide at https://guides.library.yale.edu/orcid

Open Access at Yale

Yale University Library supports many open access initiatives through membership fees. These include preprint servers like the arXiv and medRxiv, Knowledge Unlatched, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Reveal Digital, the Technical Report Archive & Image Library, and the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. Read more about our open access initiative support here.

Are you about to publish? Yale Library has agreements with some publishers that provide discounts when you publish with them. For PLOS and Cambridge University Press, the article processing charges to publish open access are completely waived. To learn more about your options and the details of our agreements, visit the library's guide to open access publishing support.

Guidelines on what the library supports and our strategy for choosing initiatives are available here.

Some of our databases have filters that allow you to see what is being published open access, including the Web of Science and Scopus. If you want to see what Yale authors have published under open access licenses, for example, do a search on Yale University using the Institution/Affiliation filter, then narrow down to open access in the results.

Orienting Yourself to Linguistics Resources: Resource Tips