For many students studying abroad, writing a dissertation is the most difficult task on their study path. Faced with so much subject knowledge, they don’t know where to dig for new research topics and find gaps in their research field. Don’t worry, the following three powerful search engines can help you and make your academic dreams come true.
Before studying abroad, many students struggle with how to find the right research topic for them and how to write a high-quality paper. To help them solve this problem, we introduce you to three powerful search engines to help them in their study process.
1. Google Scholar
First of all, let’s take a look at everyone’s favourite Google Scholar. just type in the keywords of your research, and this tool will immediately provide you with the latest research results related to your research topic. What’s even better is that at the end of each paper, you can see the authors’ predictions for the future development of the field – definitely an important clue for finding research gaps. You can find the topic you want to research based on these research trends.
2. Scopus
Next, we are going to introduce Scopus with abstract and citation databases, where you can easily get good research from all over the world just by typing in the research area you are interested in. Moreover, if you know the identification number of an author, you can also quickly find his related papers. Once you are familiar with a large number of similar papers, you can explore deeper topics based on these commonalities.
3. PubMed
Last but not least, we would like to introduce PubMed, the world’s largest free scientific literature repository, where you can type in keywords and get all the relevant literature. With “and” you can include all the keywords; with “or” you can only select one of the keywords; with “not” you can exclude related literature for the latter keyword. When you need more detailed information, you can also add some sub-themes under the subject words to make the results more accurate.
I hope this information will be helpful to students studying abroad, and help you find a satisfactory research topic, write a good thesis and get good grades. I wish you all the best of luck with your studies!
