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Searching for Publication References

Using the Publications References search you can search for specific literature references within the data sources that PSDI makes available. You can click Find a Publication Reference, to open the Find a Publication Reference search in the PSDI Cross Data Search Service in a new tab.

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Some data sources that can be searched for publication references may include results that are not publicly available. To see more results, use the login button to log into PSDI before searching.

You can configure your search to use as many or as few of the following fields in the Linked Publication Reference as necessary:

  • Author name: Add a full or partial name for the author, for example you can search using the surname only.
  • Title: Add a full or partial title for the publication, for example you can search using a keyword you expect to find in the title.
  • DOI: This must be the exact DOI of the publication.
  • Journal: Add a full or partial name for the Journal.
  • From year: Add a minimum value for year, this should be in the format of YYYY, for example 1979 or 2021.
  • Until year: Add a maximum value for year to create a range of time in which a reference was published. This should be a higher number than the value specified in the From year.
  • Volume: Add a value for the volume number of the publication, this must be the exact volume of the journals specified in the search.

Once you have configured the constraints for your search query, you can choose the data sources that you want to search. Only those data sources that include publication reference information are available to search. By default all of the relevant data sources are selected.

To change, add or remove data sources from the search:

  1. Click on the Select data sources to search button. A list of the available data sources to search is displayed with descriptions. All the available data sources are selected by default. Selected data sources are indicated with a tick icon to the left of the data source name.
  2. Optional: If you want to know more about a particular data source, you can click on the View resource catalogue link to read more about it.
  3. Optional: You can select or deselect all of the available data sources by clicking on the All or None buttons near the top of the list.
  4. Select the data sources that you want to search. You can search for specific data sources by scrolling through the list or by entering the name of the data source in the Filter data sources text field at the top of the list.
  5. When you have finished selecting the data sources for your search, click the cross (X) symbol at the top left of the list.

Once you have configured the constraints for your search query and selected the data sources you can click on the Search button to perform the search.

Search and Search Results​

When you click on the Search button to perform your search, the list of data sources you selected to search is displayed with the progress in retrieving the results for each one. A tick symbol next to the data source name indicates results were retrieved successfully. You can cancel the search if you want to stop and view the retrieved results by clicking the Cancel button. If all the data sources returned results successfully, the list of data sources is replaced by the list of results.

If a cross appears next to a data source, this indicates an error was returned from that data source. The list of data sources will remain on screen so that you can see which data sources returned an error. To view more details about the cause of the errors and to view successful results, click the Results button.

For each result returned by the search query, a 'result card' is displayed. The content of the result cards is determined by the fields that are returned by each data source, so not all information is available for every record. At the top right of each result card you can see from which data source the result originates.

You can configure the number of results that are displayed per page using the per page dropdown at the top left of the page. You can also configure how many results for each database are displayed using the per database dropdown at the top left of the page.

Some data sources enable you to view more information about the data or to download the data. For example, the Crystallographic Open Database (COD) allows you to view a visualisation of the molecule and to download the data associated with the publication reference information. The controls for these additional functions can be found at the top right of the result card.

The Source tab in the result card provides the contents of the result record in JSON format.

What to do next​

There are multiple ways to search the data sources accessible through PSDI, find out how to use our other search methods:

Related links:

PSDI offers other ways to search for data that are not included in our Cross Data Search service. Explore these links to access additional data sources offered by PSDI:

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