AUAS Library

How to Find?

Where can you find what information? See our suggestions for finding all kinds of material in the AUAS Library, databases and websites.

A LIST OF ALL INFORMATION RESOURCES

Because information is often dispersed over various sources, our information specialists have made a list of what can be found where. Click a subject for suggestions.

Questions? Ask the Library.

CataloguePlus

Articles can be found via the search bar on this website (or CataloguePlus ) and then limit the search results to articles or newspaper articles. If the article is full-text available, click the link to read it.

Google Scholar

Academic articles can be found via Google Scholar . Click Instellingen to change the language to English. To see which subscriptions AUAS has, go to settings > Library links > find HvA, mark and save it. If the article is available via the Library, click the text HvA Full Text to open the article (then click Show).

Databases

If you are looking for specific information, it is better to search a database . A database has more options, thus enabling you to search more effectively. Use the filters for Discipline or Type. Or go to your subject page to see which databases are the best ones in your discipline.

Newspaper articles

LexisNexis is a database (daily updated) with full-text articles from digital archives of Dutch and foreign newspapers.

Delpher/kranten [in Dutch] is a historic newspaper database, where you can find the original texts of over 1 million newspapers from the 17th to the 20th century.

Within AUAS and UvA

Check CataloguePlus . Click Advanced Search to search by author, words from the title, subject or ISBN.

Other libraries

Picarta is the central catalogue of ca 400 libraries in the Netherlands. For each title there is a button 'available at' which shows which library holds this title.

If a book is not available in the Netherlands, you can search in libraries worldwide via WorldCat .

If you wish to know how to request books from outside AUAS and UvA, please ask at the desk of your library.

Backward chaining

If you have found an important source (article or book), it may be interesting to see which other articles and books it refers to in its reference list or bibliography. This way you find more articles on the same subject, but naturally these are older than your first source.
Searching this way is known as the snowball method.

Forward chaining

If you have found an important source (article or book), it may also be interesting see which articles and books refer to this source. This way you find more recent articles on the same subject.

The easiest way to do this is Google Scholar . Find an article or book in Google Scholar and click “cited by”.

Many databases (e.g. the EBSCO databases Business Source Premier, CINAHL, ERIC) add the references to the bibliographic data of articles under the heading "cited by" or "cited references".

Impact factors

How do you know the value or import of a specific (academic) article? An important way to measure this is the impact factor. It checks how often articles from a specific journal are being cited. The more often an academic journal is cited in other journals, the higher its impact factor. There are also other ways to measure the academic impact and importance of a journal (for example, the h-index , journal ranking etc.). It is also possible to see the impact factor of a specific article, instead of the whole journal.

Where can you find impact factors?

  • In the database Web of Science
  • Many journals mention their impact factor on their website, usually in the colophon, at "about us" or something similar.
  • Impact factors of legal journals can be found on the website of Law Journals: Submissions and Ranking .
  • Google Scholar metrics .
  • SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).
  • In some databases (e.g. ProQuest and EBSCO) you see "altmetrics" at articles and journals. This is statistical information which indicates the importance of the article or journal.

CataloguePlus

E-books can be found via the search bar on this website (or CataloguePlus ), then limit the search to "books" and "online".

E-book collections

You can also open a specific e-book collection via the database list. Such collections have more search options (for example, searching the full text of the book).
Go to Databases and under Type select "E-books" to see all e-book collections.

Images can be found quite easily with Google Images . However, finding copyright-free images or images we are allowed to use provided the source is mentioned, is just as easy (see creative commons [Dutch] or Wikipedia [for the same information in English]). Below are a number of options.

Please note: many sites offer copy-right free images, but you must always acknowledge the source.
More information for lecturers.

Brttannica ImageQuest

Britannica Image Quest offers millions of copyright-free images. Search on keyword en filter on collection or format. Make a personal account for saving and organizing images. For each image, ImageQuest indicates how to acknowledge the source correctly, e.g. in the APA-style.

Koninklijke Bibliotheek

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek – national library of the Netherlands – has a collection of images which you are allowed to use, provided you mention the source (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag). [Dutch interface]

Europeana

The Europeana website has an image collection focused on Europe. It also contains videos and audio files. A number of these resources cannot be reused. The information accompanying the images indicates if and how they may be used.

Pixabay

Pixabay is a website with a collection of free images. The pictures and videos are free of copyright under Creative Commons CC0 . This means that you are allowed to download, modify, distribute and use them without paying royalties. The same goes (partly) for the Dreamstime collection.

Google advanced image search

The option Google advanced image search allows you to search for images with some specific requirements, such as format, colour and type. It is also possible to indicate which usage rights you are looking for (not filtered by licence, share and/or modify).

Google search by image

Use the search function in Google images if you need more information on a specific image: click the camera to paste the URL of a picture or select to upload a picture.

Pexels

Pexels is a website with free images, free from copyrights under Creative Commons 0. There are several search options e.g. colour, and tools for Mac and Windows.

Pics4learning

A collection of images esepcially for education: Pics4learning .

To keep up to date about new publications, you can use alert services. You can do this in the following ways:

Via RSS

If it is possible to keep up to date via RSS feeds, you can do so by clicking the RSS button. Paste the URL in your RSS reader (for example, Netvibes ) or in apps on your tablet or smartphone (for example, Feedly ).

Via email

To receive alerts via email, you must usually have a personal account. You can then save a search query as an alert. Sometimes you can also subscribe to the table of contents of a journal.

Books

Stay up to date by subscribing to the RSS feed of the acquisition list of your subject or faculty. When new books have arrived, you get a mail in the mailbox of your RSS reader.

Articles in databases

A number of databases to which the AUAS Library subscribes provide the option to set an alert. This way you only have to perform one search. If you save this search, you will then be kept up to date about newly published articles in your discipline or research subject.
You can also subscribe to the table of contents of a journal. As soon as a new issue is published, you will receive an email with links to the articles.

Search engines

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine which specialises in searching and finding data and statistics.

AUAS Databases

A number of statistical resources can be found in the database list of the AUAS Library:

  • Statline - Statistics Netherlands
  • Eurostat – the EU Bureau of Statistics
  • Marketline - Provides country, company and market reports, data and analysis such as PESTLE/DESTEP, SWOT and Porter's Five Forces.
  • Statista - Provides over 1 million statistics on 80,000 topics.

Other resources

Many research data can be found freely on the internet. You can find these by entering the subject + the words statistic(s), data, (official) figures and trends etc. in a search engine. Below is a list of resources:

The HBO Kennisbank [Dutch interface] provides access to Bachelor's and Master's theses, which were marked 8 or higher, by students of most of the unversities of applied sciences in the Netherlands.

UvA Scripties online [Dutch interface] contains the theses of students of the University of Amsterdam.

Are you searching for a thesis of university students from outside the UvA (and the Netherlands)? Search Open access theses and dissertations .

CataloguePlus

Video material can be found via the search bar on this website (or CataloguePlus ), then limit the search result to "Audiovisual".

Databases

There are also databases specially for video material. Go to Databases and select the publication type "Audio and images".

Internet

Besides the universally known Youtube , you can also search via Vimeo . Read about the differences .

Pearltrees

Via Subjects you can find web resources. Click your faculty or subject to see the list of web resources.

Google

In Google you can find websites similar to our Library website by using the Google code: related:url.

Examples:

  • related:marketingfacts.nl. With this Google code (or Google command) you can find 44 related websites;
  • related:volksgezondheidenzorg.info finds 7 similar websites;
  • related:carrieretijger.nl finds 46 other websites.

Other

Similar Site Search : searches for related websites. You can search by URLs and/or search terms. If you use this site to find websites similar to itself, you get a list of more websites which can find related websites.

Published by  HvA Library 20 November 2023