Instructions on how to do your own research
How do you do your research?
It is not difficult to do your own research. Research helps you better understand the topic and know the correct terminology related to the topic.
What is a research?
A research is a search for data on a certain topic. The result is a list of literature needed for writing a term paper/bachelor's thesis/dissertation, as well as a scholarly paper.
We recommend library databases (online catalogues) in particular for searching for relevant literature.
How do I get started?
First, we recommend you to think about the so-called keywords - specialist terms that describe the topic. You will need to edit the keywords while searching.
HOW TO ENTER A SEARCH QUERY
When searching databases, you can type keywords using extension characters or combine them using logical operators
(in the context of electronic information resources, keywords need to be written in English).
Extension characters:
* asterisk ─ represents any number of characters in the word
e.g. compar* = searches for compared, comparative, comparator and variants
? question mark ─ represents exactly 1 character in the word
e.g. B?hler can search for Behler, Bühler, Böhler
can be used if there is unknown character on the keyboard)
"x x" quotation marks ─ to write the exact phrase (multi-word name)
e.g. "freedom of speech", "department of civil law"
Logical operators:
AND ─ to search for both phrases at once in one record
e.g. "legal history" AND "comparative law"
OR ─ to search for the 1st or 2nd term
e.g. criminology OR criminalistics
NOT ─ to exclude the second option
e.g. commercial NOT financial
You only need to choose some of the specialized databases available to students of Comenius University in Bratislava. It is easiest to start with "local" databases (e.g. online catalogues).
Specialist bibliographic databases for searching Slovak/Czech literature
Online catalogues of Slovak libraries with legal literature holdings
CU online catalogue
It is useful for searching for books and theses. Detailed instructions for ordering and borrowing books are in the online catalogue – Help.
Specific records can be saved within the search results. You can email or export selected or all documents in the search to a file.
Central Register of Publications
Database of CU staff publications records
A bibliographic database that will help you to find articles and other documents, if you want to see what your lecturer or supervisor has published on the topic of your thesis, for example.
(Bibliographic databases can be very useful for building up a comprehensive picture of the literature on a given topic. They will allow you to quickly and easily make an overview of publications, but usually without direct access to the texts themselves.)
University Library in Bratislava - catalogue
Slovak Library - Portal to catalogues and collections of the Slovak Libraries
InfoGate
Infogate is a book catalogue with more than 1.5 million records
Collective catalogue of periodicals of the Slovak Republic
It contains bibliographic and location data on over 82 thousands Slovak and foreign periodicals located in more than 700 institutions of the Slovak Republic.
Online catalogues of the Czech libraries with legal literature holdings
The Czech Collection Catalogue
It contains records of Czech and foreign monographs, special documents and serials available in the Czech libraries. Bibliographic records are supplemented with annotations and digitized elements such as the covers and contents of books.
Library of the Faculty of Law of Masaryk University in Brno
Library of the Faculty of Law of Charles University in Prague
In the next step, we recommend using licensed full-text databases.
Licensed full-text databases
The CU Academic Library offers full-text access to thousands of licensed electronic documents in the field of law. These include scholarly books, journals, proceedings, encyclopaedias, etc. from renowned publishers that are not freely available on the Internet. Their language is English, so you need to prepare the terms you will be searching for in English.
These are licensed databases, available by default from the Comenius University network in Bratislava, and if you want to work with them from home, you need to have remote access - you will receive instructions on request by e-mail at: kniznicavili.uniba.sk
If you have remote access, choose one of the full-text databases (you can find them on the Library of FLAW CU website):
https://www.flaw.uniba.sk/en/services/library/elektronicke-informacne-zdroje/
There you can also find the Guide to Electronic Information Resources in the Library of the Faculty of Law.
Almost all electronic resources subscribed to by the CU can be searched quickly and efficiently from one place using the Summon search engine, which is also on the homepage of the Library of the Faculty of Law of the CU (search field „Electronic library - electronic information resources in one place").
If you are looking for a global overview of the literature on your topic, the international bibliographic databases Web of Science and Scopus are particularly helpful. The lists of publications that can be found in these databases are very extensive.
We recommend using Web of Science or Scopus, especially if the topic of the thesis is very specific.
National or content-specific bibliographic databases are not as extensive as Web of Science and Scopus, but they can be used to quickly and easily find, for example, literature in Slovak or Czech. They only have links to the full text of some of the entries, but it is relatively easy to obtain national literature from the library.
