Struggling to find academic material for your assignment, research proposal, or thesis?The Library can help with a literature search—a systematic and comprehensive search for published academic resources on your topic.
How to request a literature search:
Complete our online form or use the Unisa Student App (available on the Android Play Store and iStore). In the app, go to Library and select Literature Search Form.
Advanced search overview
Our advanced search offers more detailed searching, allowing you to set detailed parameters for your search, such as limiting it to a certain article/chapter title, publication name, author, or keyword(s), as well as giving you the option to set a particular date range and incorporate Boolean operators (AND/OR/NOT) into your search. In addition, you can run citation searches and save searches, and request alerts for new results for the search(es) you have saved.
Lemmatization
Searches return all relevant results by applying lemmatization to search queries. Lemmatization is the process of reducing the word used as a search term to its base, the "lemma," by removing all inflectional endings, and by taking word categories and relatedness into account. This process is significantly more sophisticated than stemming, which just cuts off word endings in order to determine the word "stem."
Can I search for economics articles by JEL code?
You can search a large proportion of new content within our range of economics journals by the JEL (Journal of Economic Literature) codes attributed to individual papers using the "Advanced Search".
To search for papers by JEL code simply input the JEL code into the "Keywords" search field.
For example, to search for all recent economics papers on "D12 - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis" enter "D12" into the keywords field.
Click Search to return all recent articles that have been tagged with this particular JEL code.
How do I save searches?
Click on Advanced search (found on the right-hand side of the search bar) and enter your required search criteria.
At the bottom of the page you will be able to name this search and say whether you would like to receive alerts relating to this search. Click Save search.
At this point you can enter your email address to get updates. In order to manage your saved searches you will need to register or sign in.
How do I manage saved searches?
Sign in with your username and password and go to My Account.
Click the Manage Saved Searches button. Here you can run your search directly, delete your saved searches, and create new saved searches.