OVERVIEW
In the class exercise below, proceed sequentially through the boxes. At the bottom of the page are some post-assignment suggestions.
RELEVANCE TO THE CLASS
You can use the search techniques to locate articles about your presentation topic and find background information sources to help you understand the broader context of your topic, plus understand technical terms or concepts you encounter.
Spend two minutes setting up an ILLiad account, if you have not done so already. ILLiad enables you to order articles that Lehigh does not have electronically. Lehigh will order the item for you, or scan it if the print is available. In either case, you will receive an email with a link to the article. You may need to use ILLiad later in the semester for for other assignments or classes. Go here. Click on ILLiad. Fill out required one-time registration information.
See Interlibrary Loan for further details about interlibrary loan services.
There is a downloadable Word attachment below. Please use it to record the answers to this assignment. Download it to your computer drive, then upload it to CourseSite when complete.
FIND TWO BACKGROUND INFORMATION SOURCES ABOUT THE TOPIC OF YOUR PAPER
Go to the background information page of this guide. Find two resources that help you understand technical terminology that appears in the papers you found. These can be encyclopedia articles, books or ebooks, dictionaries, handbooks, a public website (provided it is authoritative) or anything else that can help.
In the Word document, under "background information resources", record these sources in American Chemical Society format. Go to the "Citing Sources" page of this guide for tips about how to do this.
Write two brief sentence for each resource explaining: (a) how it helps you understand your topic and (b) why you think it is reliable or authoritative.
MEDLINE SEARCHING
Open Medline (via Web of Science):
IF YOU DO NOT SEE THE MEDLINE DATABASE, CLICK ON THE DRAG DOWN DATABASE MENU AND SELECT MEDLINE. Version of the major medical/biological database MEDLINE, available out of the Web of Science interface. See MEDLINE searching library guide off library homepage.
For documentation about searching this version of Medline, see here.
Note: Medline has other versions as well. Also, Medline is not the only relevant database for literature searching; see the list of databases on the "Finding Scholarly Sources" page of this guide for other databases you may want to use in this or other classes.
If you do not see the Medline database, click on the the drag down menu for "Select a Database" and select Medline. You should see:
NOTE: Don't confuse Medline (via Web of Science) with Web of Science itself. These are separate databases. It just happens that you can get to Medline via the Web of Science interface.
In this exercise, you will find three scholarly articles.
Find papers that will help you understand, or that relate in some way (e.g. that cite!) the paper that it is the focus of your presentation.
Two of these will be scholarly articles that are not review articles. One will be a scholarly review article.
First....
FIND TWO SCHOLARLY JOURNAL ARTICLES THAT ARE NOT REVIEW ARTICLES
Design a search that draws on the search techniques that we discussed in class. Search on the topic you chose earlier in the class. The goal is find an article you have not seen before and that is really relevant to your topic.
Techniques to use when you set up a search statement:
You can put these together into one search:
Example: (bioinorganic* or bio-inorganic*) and metaboli* and “nitric oxide”
Run the search. Then, go to the left hand side and select "journal articles".
You can further focus your search results by using the "filter" options that appear to the left of the search results, after you run a search. Do not select "review" article under the "Publication Types" filter on the left.
Look within the search result for an article that interests you and make sure "review" does not appear. That is, when you open a search result record, make sure this does not appear: "Document Type: Journal Article; Review" or "Document Type: Journal Article; Systematic Review". The purpose of the article you find should be to report scientific findings, not to do a critical review of the literature. The article should contain a specific research hypothesis, which it attempts to confirm by an experiment or by deriving it using a theoretical model.
After you find one (non-"review") article that is really relevant to your area of interest, go to the Word document and do the following:
After you find this article, use it to help you find a second article that is also not a "review" article.
Some ways to use the initial article to find a second article:
After finding this second article, go to the Word document and put in all the same information as for the first article, except this time mention explicitly how you used the first article to help locate the second article.
NOW FIND ONE REVIEW ARTICLE
Find one review article, again related to your topic.
Run a search on your topic and then go to the left to see the filters. Under "Publication Types", select "review". If that is not available as an option, broaden your search a bit.
The description of publication types here, from "PubMed", points here, where you can see a definition of review articles and other types of document, including "systematic reviews". In your travels, you may hear the term PubMed used instead of Medline. The latter is a subset of PubMed; from NLM: "PubMed® comprises more than 32 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books."
In the Word document, put the article citation into American Chemical Society reference format and indicate search statement and filter used.
Fill out the items asked for in the Word document.
COMPARISON OF REVIEW & NON-REVIEW SCHOLARLY ARTICLES
For one of the two *non-review* papers that you found above, write a brief comparison of the structure and purpose of one of the non-review journal articles you found, versus the review article you found. If you can't get out to the full text of the article, just focus on the abstract. (Don't order the article via ILLiad, unless you need it for later work in the class.)
UPLOAD WORD DOCUMENT
Upload the Word document to CourseSite.
READING A JOURNAL ARTICLE
Read "How to read a journal article" from the Royal Society of Chemistry. The article points at the bottom to this resource, where you can see discussions of various articles that might prove helpful.
ADDITIONAL SEARCHING
After you have done some searching in Medline, and as you get further into your work on this class, you may want to try out some of the additional features of Medline that we discussed in class.
Other databases you can try include SciFinder and Web of Science. Contact me and I can do a Zoom session to discuss your research.
SET UP VPN
If you're off campus, VPN can help you access articles on the web that you cannot directly access otherwise. NOTE: Even with VPN on, you may be prompted for the Lehigh login and password that you use in accessing Lehigh email.
To set up VPN, see Remote Connectivity - the Lehigh VPN.