Search Swedish Non-Patent Literature for Free on DiVA

Last week we looked at NDLTD, a central online catalog of electronic theses and dissertations.  Professional patent searchers often need to locate obscure non-patent literature (NPL) prior art that mentions technology relevant to the target patent during exhaustive prior art searches, and central search portals for a particular type of NPL can come in handy in these situations.  It can be particularly useful if the portal focuses on non-English resources, which are often difficult for English-speaking prior art searchers to locate through an English interface.  Like NDLTD, DiVA Portal is another example of a central online catalog resource, since it allows users to search for publications and theses from 30 universities through an English-language interface, and the documents are often in Swedish or Norwegian.

Continue reading to learn more about the DiVA Portal, including how to locate full text documents directly through the portal!

What is DiVA Portal?

DiVA Portal is a free central search portal for locating research publications and theses from 30 universities, most of which seem to be located in Sweden and Norway (see the full list of universities here). The publishing initiative that led to the creation of the DiVA portal is known as DiVA – Academic Archive On-line, and it began in 2000 at the EPC at Uppsala University Library. The DiVA Portal website describes how “today the technical development is driven by the EPC in co-operation with the participating universities and colleges.”

According to the DiVA portal website:

The research publications and student theses found in DiVA portal have been published and registered at the university or college of origin. There is bibliographic information in the database for every title and usually an abstract and a link to the fulltext at the university or college where it was published.

Search Forms

The site interface for DiVA Portal is available in English, Swedish, or Norwegian. Through the English version of the portal, users have three search options (available under three different tabs):

• Simple Search – Under this form, users can enter a simple keyword or phrase query (Boolean operators, truncation, wildcard, phrase searching, and use of brackets are accepted in this form). Users can select to search within all documents, only research publications, or only student theses. Users can also limit the results to only documents with full text in DiVA.
• Advanced Search – research publications – Users can enter search keywords or phrases in up to three text boxes with adjacent drop-down menus of fields, and these fielded text boxes can then be connected by Boolean operators. Users can also limit the results to only documents with full text in DiVA. The search can further be limited by date range, university, subject category, status, publication type, and content.
• Advanced Search – student theses – Users can enter search keywords or phrases in up to three text boxes with adjacent drop-down menus of fields, and these fielded text boxes can then be connected by Boolean operators. Users can also limit the results to only documents with full text in DiVA. The search can further be limited by date range, university, subject category, thesis level, artistic works only, and external cooperation only.

The advanced theses search form on DiVA.

Viewing Results and Full Text

On the results page, users can select how many hits to view per page, and results can be sorted by author, title, organization, publication type, or year. Results with full-text available are marked by a green paper icon. Users may print the search list or select results via check box to create a reference list (export in BibTex, EndNote, ETDMS, MARC-XML, etc).

Search result page on DiVA.

Select the result title to view the full record, which contains bibliographic and indexing information on the document, number of views for the full record, a permanent link to the document record, an abstract, and a link to download a full-text version of the document, if available. The full record can be printed or exported as a reference.  An English-language version of the abstract is often provided in the full-record, but the full text PDF is in the original language of publication (often Swedish or Norwegian).

Full record with English abstract and option to download the document in full-text.

Conclusion

DiVA Portal provides a simple search interface (with some advanced query construction options for more experienced searchers) to locate detailed free records on various Swedish and Norwegian publications and theses.  The English interface and English-language abstracts help users locate relevant non-English prior art, which can often be viewed full text in the original language.

Do you know of any other international online catalogs for academic publications and dissertations?  Tell us about them in the comments!

This post was contributed by Joelle Mornini. The Intellogist blog is provided for free by Intellogist’s parent company Landon IP, a major provider of patent searches, trademark searches, technical translations, and information retrieval services.

About these ads