Perhaps you’ve contributed to a paper by providing reagents, or technical expertise, to enable someone else’s experiments. You might want to keep track of acknowledgement of your support. Now you can: the Acknowledgements and Funding, Materials and Methods, and Supplementary Data sections are probably relevant here.
What about that great diagram you saw a few months ago, which would be really useful in a lecture you’re preparing? You can use section-level searching to specifically search article figures. Of course, when you find it, you should check with the author or publisher that it’s ok to use the diagram, and properly attribute it, but it is now easier to find.
This last example requires a little more time to construct the search (though it’s straightforward to do from the Advanced search page):
Imagine you do research into Alzheimer’s disease, for example. A paper has been published by someone who does research into another form of tauopathy, for example frontotemporal dementia. Because frontotemporal dementia is their particular research focus, the abstract will concentrate on the importance of their findings in this area, but they may well have relevance to your research too, and the researcher will very likely discuss the wider implications of their research in their discussion, perhaps mentioning Alzheimer’s disease here. With section-level searching, you can identify these articles much more easily by confining your search to the Discussion sections of our full text articles:
(DISCUSS:”Alzheimer*” NOT ABBR:”Alzheimer*” NOT ACK_FUND:”Alzheimer*” NOT APPENDIX:”Alzheimer*” NOT AUTH_CON:”Alzheimer*” NOT CASE:”Alzheimer*” NOT COMP_INT:”Alzheimer*” NOT CONCL:”Alzheimer*” NOT FIG:”Alzheimer*” NOT INTRO:”Alzheimer*” NOT KEYWORD:”Alzheimer*” NOT METHODS:”Alzheimer*” NOT OTHER:”Alzheimer*” NOT REF:”Alzheimer*” NOT RESULTS:”Alzheimer*” NOT SUPPL:”Alzheimer*” NOT TABLE:”Alzheimer*”)
I think this last example could unearth some information nuggets that are not otherwise easy to find. It would be good to know if it yields any articles of interest if you try it!
We’d love to hear how else you might use this new refined method for searching. Let us know how you get on – as always we’re happy to receive feedback so that we can make improvements.
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