Recommendations to find information in the shortest possible time with maximum effectiveness: define what you want to find, choose where to look, perform the search, review the results and, if necessary, widen you search.
Search for information
Learn to use the tools and services we offer to find information quickly and easily.
Presentation
In addition to the Library search engine, we offer you a selection of resources and services that are of great help in finding information. To start, take a look at the infographic we have prepared to help you establish an optimal search strategy.
Library guides
Consult the Library guides for further information to optimize your citation and bibliography management process, and you will also find a selection of systems to save websites of interest to you.
A collection of multidisciplinary and subject-specific search engines, metasearch engines and directories that can help you find resources and materials for your papers or classroom use.
The Library for Research team, in collaboration with the UOC Doctoral School, has put this monograph together by selecting useful content that will help you get started on your doctoral thesis. Inside, you will find sources for finding articles, tips on academic writing and support for getting published.
Self-training
In the self-training space, we provide you with a selection of content and informative pages that will help you to learn the most important aspects of searching for information, configuring information alerts and consulting doctoral theses.
Searching for information
Below is a list of options available in the Library to find the specialist information you need for your research. To start, you can take a look at the following self-training material on how to find academic information:
This shows you the steps to take into account when searching for information, what aspects to consider before starting and how to optimize the time you have available. (Only available in English.)
The option we most highly recommend you use to search for information is the search engine on the Library website. The Library search engine allows you to search practically all the databases to which we subscribe in the same place.
Direct access to the platforms and databases of the main publishers to which the Library subscribes, allowing you to consult articles, journals, preprints, conference proceedings, etc.
The UOC's institutional repository is the portal that hosts, showcases and preserves the open-access digital publications produced by members of the UOC in the development of their research, teaching and administrative activities. It includes articles, presentations, teaching materials, final projects, doctoral theses, etc.
WoS is a bibliographic and bibliometric database provided by Clarivate. It contains references and author summaries of journal articles and conference speeches, and its coverage is multidisciplinary.
Scopus is a database provided by Elsevier that collects the scientific production published by more than 5,000 international publishers with multidisciplinary coverage. You can find articles, book chapters, books, journals, patents and proceedings.
Google Scholar is a search engine for academic articles and publications. It also allows you to activate and consult professional profiles of researchers and monitor publications and citations.
Dialnet is a bibliographic portal developed by the University of La Rioja that provides information about and access to Hispanic scientific literature.
Doctoral theses
Here are the ways you can find and consult doctoral theses.
Where can you find doctoral theses?
Discover some of the national and international repositories and databases specializing in the deposit of doctoral theses.
The UOC's institutional repository is the portal that collects, disseminates and preserves the open-access digital publications prepared by members of the UOC in the development of their research, teaching and administrative activities. It includes articles, presentations, teaching materials, final projects, doctoral theses, etc. with the aim of collecting, preserving and organizing the UOC's scientific production and memory and, above all, of disseminating them to increase their visibility and impact.
In this showcase, you can find all the doctoral theses deposited and carried out at the Doctoral School of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in the Education and ICT, Network and Information Technologies and Information and Knowledge Society programmes.
TDX (Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa) is a cooperative repository containing doctoral theses presented at the universities of Catalonia and the rest of Spain in digital format. The theses can be freely accessed and you can carry out full text searches on them, as well as searches by author, supervisor, title, subject matter, university and faculty where it was written, year of defence, etc.
The Spanish Ministry of Education's database to retrieve doctoral theses written at Spanish universities. On its website, you can monitor and consult every thesis file since 1976.
A database containing four million doctoral and master's theses from over 3,000 universities worldwide, in direct access and full text. This is the official repository of the US Library of Congress, which sees the addition of 200,000 new works every year.
DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who work together to improve global access to European research theses. It offers over 800,000 open access research theses from 617 universities in 28 European countries. This portal is endorsed by LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries).
The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). It supports electronic academic publication and open access in order to enhance the sharing of knowledge worldwide. It includes resources for university administrators, librarians, teaching staff, students and the general public.
A resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world, with over 3.5 million documents. The metadata come from over 1,100 universities and research institutions, where the full text of the original documents is stored.
Cooperative repositories
In addition to the institutional repository, the UOC also participates in a variety of cooperative repository initiatives, including the following:
You can take a look at the research work being done at research centres in Catalonia, with a special focus on open access publications. In the case of the UOC, you will find the articles, books, theses, research groups and projects of researchers holding an ORCID identifier that have been entered in the researchers' website (GIR).
A cooperative repository in which you can consult the research literature of Catalonia's universities and research centres, such as articles, master's degree final projects/research works, final projects, conference speeches, reports and work documents.
Services
Consult the various services that we offer to facilitate your information search.
Find reliable, accurate, high-quality information. We provide guidance to help you get better search results.
Is there anything missing at the Library that you think we should have? Recommend a new resource for us to add so it can be enjoyed by the UOC community as a whole. It can be a book, a digital journal, article, database, a case study, a video or something else.
Request purchases of any books you need for your teaching (such as books about the course or recommended reading), management or research work.
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Search for information
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Manage data and information
Learn how to cite your sources, and manage reference lists and research data.
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Publish and disseminate your research
We explain how the publication process works and how to raise the profile of your research.
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Evaluate your research
Learn how research is evaluated, what bibliometric indicators are and how social impact is measured.