Finding literature with EconBiz
Gaining access not only to Open Access publications
Practical guide
How to find access to economic literature with a search in the portal EconBiz
What is EconBiz?
We support Open Science through open, direct access to free full-texts. We also show how to find and access licensed literature where there is no free alternative yet.
EconBiz is a portal for searching literature in important German and international economic databases, including the holdings of the ZBW. It offers access to free and licensed full-texts on the internet, e.g. to Open Access documents provided by the ZBW.
In addition, EconBiz offers tips for researchers at every stage of their careers and help for students.
URL: www.econbiz.de
Why should I want more than Google Scholar?
Google Scholar is very useful if you are looking for a clearly described publication. However, the search engine is less useful for searching literature about a topic, as the study What every researcher should know about searching – clarified concepts, search advice, and an agenda to improve finding in academia has shown.
Three features for literature searches in EconBiz
Professional search option: EconBiz offers a professional search option if you are looking for a particular topic: synonyms and translations are automatically included in the search. If you look for “migration policy” you will also find “immigration policy”, “Zuwanderungspolitik”, “Einwanderungspolitik” or “Migrationspolitik”. Broader, narrower and related terms in the thesaurus put the topic into a hierarchical context and offer new ways to search.
Filters and sorting: Sort your results by relevance or date and use the filters to refine them further: by author, type of publication, subject, language or country of publication. The filters allow precise searches and produce more relevant results.
Personalised lists: Create personal literature lists and share them with your colleagues or your students.
Three extras from which you as a scientist can benefit
EconBiz Author Profiles: finding researchers and their subjects
EconBiz Author Profiles offer comprehensive information about authors in economics. The corresponding Persistent Identifiers (PIDs, i.e. a unique description for a digital object) make it easy to find the right person even if their name is spelled in different ways. Author Profiles show the most important subjects covered in their papers in a tag cloud. Additional author information, such as affiliation to a research institution, awards, citation information or Twitter profiles, are also available. They can give you a professional profile of interesting researchers you may meet at a conference.
If you are an economist who conducts and publishes research and do not find yourself in these EconBiz Author Profiles, you probably do not have a GND-ID yet. The GND is the Gemeinsame Normdatei, i.e. Common Authority File, of the German library system. Such an GND-ID can be created for you. Just write to the EconBiz team at info@econbiz.de. If you have publications indexed in EconBiz, the team will create an ID for you. You will then be uniquely identifiable and your publications and subjects can be found better.
EconBiz Event Calendar: finding events and calls for papers
The EconBiz Event Calendar alerts you to conferences. You can search by discipline or country and it offers information about calls for papers and their deadlines. It also offers many filter options similar to those in the literature search. You may even find conferences in your discipline that you haven’t heard of yet!
Research institutions can ensure that their event will be found nationally and internationally by entering it into the event calendar.
Academic Career Kit: your entry into the world of scholars
EconBiz also offers advice for entering an academic career. The Academic Career Kit gives guidance on “Publish your Paper”, “Metrics and Networking” and “Research Data Management”.
Students learn how to work scientifically with EconBiz
Students benefit from guides on how to do scientific work and how to write term papers in the section Research Skills. Interactive trainings and videos help to gain information skills. The chat service “Research Guide EconDesk” is highly recommended, where an expert team offers individual support to students in their search for literature or facts.
Teachers and students are equally enthusiastic about the brochure “Write your best paper in economics and business studies” which is available in print, as PDF, and a CC-BY version in German and English.
Date: September 2021
Questions, comments and notes are welcome at info@econbiz.de