document/information type

In these years of Google, we all tend to type anything somewhere and then are disappointed that we don't find what we need.
Especially scientific information is stored into purposive databases, for instance according to document type. Therefore it is wise to start thinking beforehand and consider the options.

Most people tend to start searching for articles, without considering other types of information.

Compared with books, articles can be much more recent, generally have shorter production times and therefore can be very much more current. But, books summarize piles of articles, and put them into one story, an integration there for you to enjoy.

Moreover, data provided in books, such as handbooks, have been evaluated and compiled, saving you a lot of time searching all the individual experiments described in articles.

Depending on the discipline, proceedings and conferences can be very important. Some disciplines can be very formal and the only way for scientists to gain status is by publishing in highly regarded journals such as Science or Nature. But other disciplines , for instance computer science, are much more informal and rely strongly on personal contacts. Then, conferences play an important role and proceedings can be a fast way of communicating. A conference is a good place to present work-in-progress and see how your peers react. Therefore, papers presented at conferences are usually not the final conclusions of a particular research.

Patents are not scientific documents in the narrow sense of the word. Patents are legal documents, providing protection against abuse of intellectual property, in exchange for disclosure. Patents describe industrial research, usually strongly application oriented. The language of a patent tends to be vague. Experimental descriptions may lack detail to copy procedures. On the other hand, most patents contain pictures showing the invention which is described. Patenting is part of a company’s business policy: sometimes it is wiser NOT to apply for a patent and just be silent about a particular part of an appliance.