As a closing gesture for this project, the class has been asked to make a final blog posting that includes our recommendations regarding where new scientists/engineers should be looking for information, including a variety of literature we've learned about in this course.
Below is my list of recommendations:
-Science and Nature and other broad coverage materials: that will help you keep up to date with what is occurring in disciplines outside of your own. This will allow you to think outside of the box when creating and implementing research projects but also make your projects more comprehensive.
-Discipline and sub-discipline scholarly journals: a good source for discovering what journals this encompasses is conducting a “subject group” search within ISI Web of Science or discipline searches within tools such as Ulrich’s Directory of Periodicals. Remember older materials and open access materials are just as important as the most current commercial journals.
-E-prints: searching http://arxiv.org and similar resources will allow you to further explore research projects while they are occurring.
-Your instructors: are always good sources of information! Whether you ask them directly or explore their publications, you can learn a lot from what they have already done and how they accomplished it.
-Your textbooks. The authors often include citations or well researched suggestions for supplementary reading.
-Encyclopedias: such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, offer a good starting point for exploring unfamiliar topics and offer supplementary sources that are often well established and accepted.
-Specific/pertinent laboratory websites: created to offer the public information on current projects conducted there, take advantage! Good source for learning about current trends and top researchers themselves.
-The electronic databases available for your specialization: I found the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science to be a really interesting source that opened my eyes to the large amounts of resources available out there and can help to narrow down what databases are appropriate for specific disciplines.
-Pathfinders provided by your institution’s library. These resources make it easier to quickly find pertinent resources.
-ISI Web of Knowledge/Science
-Institutional repositories: these are archives of published works often available to the public or members of the institution and are often searchable and organized by discipline. An example of this would be the Ohio State University’s “Knowledge Bank” .
-Interdisciplinary databases and search engines: Google, Google Scholar, Academic Search Complete, Yahoo.com, Clusty.com, WorldCat are good places to start when exploring topics. Clusty.com offers features such as the clustering of search results which creates a quicker access to the needed materials because they are categorized for you.
-Professional/informal organizations and associations: these will often times provide members with bulletins or journals and offer conferences that facilitate discussion of issues within academic disciplines. These are hot beds of information that nurture burgeoning research projects and provide you with colleagues with common interests that are also great sources of information!
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Your professors! yay! I know that it is fairly common for professors to support a student's researching efforts, but I know as a student that I was often intimidated by asking my professors for research assistance, I figured that if I was already at the college level I should already have some idea of what I was doing or I should ask a librarian instead, but for in depth science research, asking the professors would be more beneficial as they are immersed in the literature because of their profession- not as one of the many subjects that librarians must be familiar with.
ReplyDeleteNicely put together. I like how you included everything from old school encyclopedias and textbooks to new school search engines and databases.
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