Glossary of terms
Clicking a link in the glossary will take you to an external website.
Bibliographic databases: facilitate searches for journal articles, books, newspapers, exhibition catalogues, audiovisual items and papers in any given subject area. Some of the databases are full text, which enable printing, emailing or downloading of articles or papers. However, many databases are not full text. Instead, these databases only supply the bibliographic details of the journal or publication such as the title, volume number, date of publication, etc. Once you have this information check the Catalogue (LRD) to ascertain whether or not the Library holds the particular journal or publication.
Catalogue (LRD): gives details of every item which is either held in hard copy or available electronically through the Library including bibliographic databases.
Journals: publications that are produced on a regular or ongoing basis. Also known as serials or periodicals. Journals in UNSW Library are not available for loan.
Monograph: a scholarly piece of writing on a specific, often limited subject which is complete in itself. The term is basically a synonym for book and the opposite of a serial or journal.
MyCourse Reserve: is a temporary location for items that are in high demand, generally on reading lists. The Reserve collection is located in three places: one large collection on the entry level of the Main Library and smaller collections in the UNSW Freehills Law and COFA Libraries. Reserve items are available for short-term loan, some for overnight loan. They cannot be reserved. The call numbers of the items reflect their permanent location in the library, e.g. MBQ 570/17 D would usually be on the shelves in the Main Library; CFA 629.2275/1 would be on the main shelves at COFA library.
Peer-reviewed: a journal is peer-reviewed when an article is published in it only after receiving approval by a board of experts (the author’s “peers”). The term is synonymous with “refereed.” Some bibliographic databases allow you to limit a search to peer-reviewed articles only.
Plagiarism: using the words or ideas of others and presenting them as your own. Plagiarism is a type of intellectual theft. It can take many forms, from deliberate cheating to accidentally copying from a source without acknowledgement. (UNSW Learning Centre)
Primary sources: represent original thinking, reports on discoveries or events, or share new information. Usually they represent the first formal appearance of original research. They include statistical data, manuscripts, surveys, speeches, biographies, autobiographies, diaries, oral histories, interviews, works of art and literature, research reports, government documents, computer programs, original documents (birth certificates, trial transcripts...) etc. Secondary sources are texts based on primary sources, and involve generalization, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, or evaluation.
SFX: offers a way of navigating between and within electronic resources. SFX allows students and researchers to link from a citation in a database to a list of different services available for that item including;
- links to the full text of a cited article;
- links to the holdings of the item in the LRD and other library catalogues;
- an interlibrary loans form if the journal is not held by UNSW library (staff & postgraduates only);
- a book purchase request form if the book is not held in the UNSW library;
- a citation search for the author in Web of Science;
- search of the web for the title.
Sirius: the gateway and search facility for the Library's electronic resources providing access to databases, e-journals, e-books and subject guides. Use Sirius to access:
- bibliographic databases of both full text and non-full text book and journal articles;
- electronic reference resources including dictionaries, encyclopaedias, maps, patents, standards, statistics and handbooks;
- selected web resources including search engines, web gateways and subject guides.
Thesaurus: a guide to the use of terms, showing relationships between them, (for example broader or narrower terms) for the purpose of providing a standardized, controlled vocabulary in the use of bibliographic databases etc.
Truncation: the use of a symbol included in the middle or at the end of a word to include possible variations in spelling and alternate endings when searching an electronic database. For example: child* will find child, children, childhood and childish; wom?n will find woman or women.