In the week of 2-6 March we won't have a class. You need to make an appointment with your faculty supervisor before next week and see him or her with
This week we'll look at some tools for finding more primary and secondary sources, building upon the PubMed, FirstSearch and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts databases we looked at in Week 3. You'll probably need to continue to work with those databases as you refine your topic and terminology, but they may not solve all problems.

We also need to consider how to choose a focus (in short: go with what you've got or can find easily), and how to approach writing annotations (since they're a considerable part of the last assignment).

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.

The specialized databases aren't necessarily current (there's a lag time between publication and appearance in databases), so it's necessary to have some other tools in the armamentarium. We'll look at Eventually somebody will figure out a clever way to make one search of multiple databases, but at the moment that's technically a bit difficult with these, and would be rather slow.