Help searching for papers

[fancyfeast]

Hi all,

I was wondering if any of you have advice for someone (me) who struggles with finding relevant research papers for troubleshooting and protocols. I use a combination of Web of Science, SciFinder, and Google Scholar (I usually start of one and move on to another if I'm not finding what I want). I'm not sure why this is so hard for me but I needed to look up a protocol for a specific reaction last week and couldn't find it for hours! Now I'm trying to find a paper to do a proteolysis experiment on wild type and modified proteins. I ideally would like to find a paper that describes the methods for the control proteolysis (concentration, incubation time, etc.) but I'm also looking for more general papers to give me some direction before I start.

I've started looking up "name of protein proteolysis" and other search terms but I can feel it might take a while to find something even though I feel what I'm looking for shouldn't be hard to find.

Does/did anyone else have this problem? Am I doing something wrong?

Any advice is appreciated

[pears]

eBrary is sometimes a helpful resource, as is the book-searching feature of Google; it's kind of like Scholar, but it will occasionally yield introductory textbooks that have previews available. academia.edu can also be a useful resource for papers, but I find it's the most useful when I have a particular person in mind whose work I want to read; they often have at least a CV or some titles of their work posted, if not .pdfs of the pieces themselves. If you're a current student, plonking your buns in a chair on campus in the library will often yield the best results, in terms of both hard copy materials and access to .pdfs. That said, we're in totally opposite fields, so YMMV.

[zipykido]

Use PubMed, search for publications that use your technique of interest. Quickly skim through the methods section and supplemental materials. Specifics are usually left out of publications for whatever reason which is annoying but you can always email the authors and ask them for protocols.