Library

Find journal articles, newspaper articles, book reviews etc.

Note: the search above won't find every article, for a more comprehensive search see the information below on databases.

To find relevant and good quality information for your work, searching databases is the most effective method. You have free access to a range of searchable databases though you may need your username and password to use some of them. Databases contain quality-assessed journal or newspaper articles on particular topics.

Databases

• Databases for Computing Science

For help using specific databases - see guides which are found by clicking on the "Full details of this resource" link on individual database records on the databases lists.

Internet sites

General Sites

• British Computer Society - A useful site for computing industry news, selected articles from the BCS magazine ITNow and a section specifically for computing students.
• Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies - A collection of bibliographies on specific topics within the computing science subject area. A bibliography is a list of works, e.g. books, journal articles, on a particular subject area.
• Computer Science Technical Reports - A fully searchable collection of over 45,000 technical reports, mainly from academic institutions.
• Current Cites - Produced at the University of California, Berkeley, this site provides a monthly selection of annotated reviews of literature on information technology. Also available as an RSS feed.
• World Wide Web Consortium - The web site of the W3C, which includes technical reports, specifications and tutorials.
• Free online dictionary of Computing

Sites relating to software

• FSF/Unesco Free Software Directory - A directory of freely available software that runs under free operating systems.
• Java.sun.com - Sun's site for Java developers, including downloads, articles, tutorials and technical information.
• SourceForge - The site offers free hosting to Open Source software development projects.

If you would like some advice on searching for information, please contact me by email roma.thompson@glasgow.ac.uk or by phone 0141 330 6711.

You might find some resources useful for your dissertation which we don't have available from this Library. Through our Inter Library Loan service you can order books and journal articles free of charge. See the Need Something We Don't Have section on our website.

A general introduction to referencing is available.

Referencing and citing – using your sources

What is referencing?

Referencing is the acknowledgement of items you have read and used while creating a written piece of work for your essay, dissertation, article or thesis.

It is important to keep an exact and complete record of the details of all the sources of information that you use for coursework, essays, dissertations or publications. Sources can include books, journal articles, web pages and legal cases. If you don’t keep a precise record you will have difficulty (and a lot more work) when you need to list the sources in your reference list.

Citations

When writing an essay, report or dissertation, it is usual to cite [mention] the sources that you used, referred to, or took quotes from. These references might describe journal or newspaper articles, books, government reports, web pages

Citing accurate references is important for the following reasons:

• To give credit to concepts and ideas from other authors
• To provide evidence of the extent of your reading
• To use other work to support the arguments you make
• To allow the user to locate the cited references easily
• To help you avoid plagiarism

 Which style of referencing does the School of Computing Science use?

There are many styles for references, however, the most commonly used styles are Harvard (a version using author/date format) and Vancouver (numbered format).

For detailed information, have a look at the Harvard Referencing guide from Leeds University.

Software for managing your references

There are a number of reference management software programs which help you to record and store references to books or journal articles and many other sources while you are working on a project. You can then use the stored information to generate bibliographies for your essay, thesis or article using a wide range of styles. The University supports EndNote. There are also a number of freely available pieces of reference management software.