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(updated 4/11/2024)
The goal of this exercise is to help you learn how to navigate and use library resources. Above all, have fun with the exercise! Record answers for below in the Word document in CourseSite.
1.
Quickly compare these two articles:
What differences are there in: audience; whether they have a bibliography; structure; and use of technical terminology? Put your answer into a Word document. Tip: review the page of this guide about the difference between popular and scholarly articles.
2.
Find a magazine or newspaper article about the topic of your final project. For this, use one of the resources in the Articles page of this guide. Make sure to find a popular article, not a scholarly one. Some databases have both types. Follow the directions on the articles page to limit your search to popular articles.
If you use one resource in the Popular Articles page and don't find what you need, try another one. TIP: try a search that is ballpark and use it to get ideas for refining your search.
Put the citation into your Word document.
3.
Write down a concept that appears in the article (from 2) that you'd like to learn more about. Go to the background information page of this guide and find an item that explains the concept. (Don't use Wikipedia.) Write in your Word document the title of the item you found and where you found it. Use the criteria in the "Evaluating Web Resources" to evaluate the item in a few sentences.
4
Then go to Web of Science and find a scholarly article that is ballpark with the topic of the popular article you found in (2).
Put in your topic and run a search on it. Example:
(popular OR public) AND opinion AND "nuclear power") AND (japan* OR russia*)
Find a paper whose title and abstract look interesting. No need to read the article at this point, but click on Lehigh Links
and see if the full text is available. If you don't see a direct link to the full text, recall what was said in class about the interlibrary loan service called "ILLiad". You don't need to order the article!
Create a citation for the item by putting its title into ZoteroBib. The Citing Your Sources page of this guide demos how to use ZoteroBib. Choose American Psychological Association style when you do this. Put the citation into the Word document.
You'll create a citation that appears at the end of a paper in a list of references. There is another type of citation, an in-text citation, that is in the body of a paper and point to the full citation at the end of the paper.
5. How many times was the paper you found cited by later papers? Find the "citations" number on the right; here is an example:
Looking at later papers citing the first one is a powerful way to search; one paper only cites another if the first paper is relevant or related in topic.
6. On the left of your Web of Science search results, look under "Document Types" for "Review Article". A good review article reviews recent trends in research about a topic. Look over some of the titles and abstracts of the results to get a sense of what a review article looks like. If you did not find a review article, broaden your search and then look for one. When done, record a title and put it in the Word document.
ONLY IF YOU HAVE TIME DURING THE CLASS; OTHERWISE DO THIS AFTER THE CLASS:
Set up an ILLiad account. This requires a one-time registration. You can then have it ready to go should you need ILLiad at some point. (P.S.: you can use Palci for books.)
ILLiad requires a one-time registration. To do so, click on the interlibrary loan link here and fill out the registration form.
Tips for completing the registration form: