Further refinements of searching, solving common problems,
and
how to use the drop box for submissions
« Please note that I'll be away on Friday the 31st
»
What do you do if there's too much, or not enough? How do you focus upon
a topic? The best way to proceed is in consultation with your faculty
supervisor, but it seems a good rule of thumb that you should use what
you can get your hands on --since you have to read and
annotate the articles which appear in your bibliography.
Compound searches: several of the databases allow you to specify different
sorts of search terms:
- PubMed: a search
JAMA[ta] AND pasteurella[word] finds 10
articles
from JAMA;
N Engl J Med[ta] AND pasteurella[word] finds 9
articles;
Microbiology[ta] AND pasteurella[word] finds 12
articles.
Note that the AND has to be capitalized,
and the journal title has to be exactly what PubMed recognizes. You can
read about Boolean syntax and ascertain correct PubMed
journal titles.
- FirstSearch Advanced mode allows combinations of terms from
various fields, differing from one database to another
- Cambridge Scientific Abstracts Advanced mode allows the use of
codes. Thus, a search for ab=fire and de=germination finds 27
articles with 'fire' in the abstract and 'germination' as a descriptor,
some of which are in journals at W&L
- we've already noted that the ISI databases allow restriction by
article type; there's also a field for journal title, and another for
author. Thus, a search for topic=methanococcus and
author=bult turns up the Science article on the complete genome
sequence of M. jannaschii.
Note that each database has its own conventions, but their HELP
files are usually pretty good. The point to pick up is that you'll always
need to do enough exploration with a new database to get control of its
powers and find out how to make it yield its gems; practise with a few
can make it easier for you to learn others when you need to.
Journal and publisher searching: there's a lot out there, and
some titles we don't have in paper we can get to in electronic full
text.
Academic Press IDEAL and Springer may be very helpful, since they
offer search engines and allow you to get to full text of journals we don't
have.
And don't overlook UnCover (but remember that it's just words
which appear in the
article title [or an author's name] that you can use to search).
NSF and
NIH grants: current research which hasn't yet made it into the journals
can be very useful, and the abstracts that are part of grant
applications may provide explanations and sometimes names of
researchers.
A Few Words About Annotations
The idea is to summarize in your own words, and it doesn't have to
be
elaborate. Most articles don't have that many ideas --they're bricks in
a towering edifice of scholarship, and each should contribute
something new, some new insight or finding. Your task is to comprehend
that contribution and express it in your words. If you've done the
necessary background reading (and understand the terminology), you'll be
able to do this pretty easily
once you've had a bit of practise. It's a skill worth cultivating.
Try to avoid "In this article...", "This article is about...",
"The
authors of this article found that...". Cut to the chase and say
what it
is that the article has to say that makes it worthy of inclusion in your
precis of the literature for your topic.
Pseudomonas example