Searching for Conference Publications in Catalyst (Arthur Lakes Library)

Searching for Conference Publications in Catalyst

Often when you are searching a database for journal articles, your results will include some citations for conference publications. It is important to be able to recognize these, because it will affect how you search for them in Catalyst.

1. Identify the conference publication.

Note the citation below from GeoRef. Look for such commonly used terms as proceedings, symposium, meeting, or conference. If there is a Conference or similar field in the citation, then that is a sure sign that you are looking at a conference citation.

According to the citation's Conference field, the title below is included in the Proceedings of the fifth IFP Exploration and Production Research Conference.

GeoRef Brief Citation:

GeoRef Full Citation:

2. Search Catalyst to see if the Library owns the proceedings from this conference.

Select unique terms from the citation (NOT the title or author of the conference paper! As with individual journal articles, individual conference papers cannot be searched in Catalyst.). Some useful pieces of information from the above record might be:

--"Exploration and Production Research" (one unique phrase taken from the Monograph Title information.)

--"IFP" (you may have to type the full name: Institut français du pétrole)

--"Arles" (location of conference)

3. Go to the Custom Search tab in Catalyst, and copy information from the record into the search fields.

Let's start with a search for the conference name as a phrase. Select "Keywords Anywhere" from the "Search By:" menu. If this doesn't work, we can plug-in some of the other pieces of information. Note in the example below we've taken what we hope is a fairly unique part of the citation's "Monograph Title" and searched for it as a phrase.

And, It worked!

Here's the Catalyst Record:

The dates and location of the conference match those from the GeoRef record. You can find the proceedings for this conference on the 2nd floor of the Library using the Call Number given. According to the GeoRef record, the paper you want is on pp. 445-449 of the volume.

In the case of the search above, the individual conference was cataloged completely in Catalyst. Sometimes, however, a conference that is held on a regular basis will be treated as a series. For instance you'll see a record that looks like this (note especially the "Serial" graphic:

"1946" is simply the date of the first issue of the conference publication that the library received. Don't be put off by this date. If you examine the record, you'll see that the Library actually owns the proceedings from 1946 through 1970:

Final Note: Conference Proceeding searches in Catalyst do not always work the first time. It can be a process of trial and error. If you have tried a few different searches and still don't find it, then ask a reference librarian for help. If the librarian can't find it then we probably don't own it, and you can order it through Prospector or Interlibrary Loan.