This article was automatically translated from Japanese using AI. The Japanese version is the authoritative version.

Once you join a lab, you will almost certainly be asked at some point to present a paper at a journal club.

Journal club formats vary from lab to lab, but in many cases you are expected to find a paper yourself, read it yourself, and present it.
Even outside of journal clubs, searching the literature is essential to research, since you need to know what has already been done.

Here I would like to introduce some tools that come in handy for this.

Google Scholar

The first one is Google Scholar.

It is so well known that there is probably no researcher who has not heard of it.

Basically you can search just as you would on Google, but everything that comes up is bibliographic data such as papers and books.

It is the tool you reach for when you want to search broadly, so I suspect it is the most widely used for literature searches.
I also use Google Scholar when I just want a quick look: I type in some rough keywords and use it as a screening step.

The flip side of being able to search broadly is that there are few options for specifying details.

Still, the main filters are there, such as publication date and relevance, so it covers most needs.
And when you want to restrict the search to a particular journal, you can just put the journal name in the keywords—exactly the same approach as a Google search.

PubMed

The next one is PubMed.

PubMed is probably the best-known literature search tool in the life sciences.

What makes this tool remarkable is the sheer variety of ways you can search for papers.

You can search by author, journal, editor—pretty much any field you can think of.

It is extremely useful when you already know the journal, the author, or any other details you want to search on.

Web of Science

The last one is Web of Science.

It is a paid service, but if you belong to a university you can generally access it through the campus Wi-Fi, so students can use it for free.

Where this tool really shines is that it lets you look up the impact factor (IF).

The IF is a kind of journal ranking—a value indicating how strong a journal is.

If you search Google for “journal name IF,” an impact factor will come up, but it is often not the official value.

Web of Science is the organization that officially publishes IFs, so you can find the correct value there.

I use Web of Science as an IF lookup tool when deciding which journal to submit to, or when I want to get a sense of how impressive a professor’s papers are.

Final thoughts

I use Google Scholar most of the time, but knowing about the other tools is handy when you need to look something up in a more specific way.