Scientific Literature

• Henry Oldenburg, the journal’s first editor, began the process of having submissions evaluated by subject experts. Thus begins peer-review.

• Published papers by Newton, Faraday, and Darwin.

• The earliest science journal dates to 1665.

• Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Where science journals began…

About scientific literature

Every legitimate science research article is published in a peer-reviewed/scholarly science journal.

But…Not every article in a peer-reviewed/scholarly science journal is a research article. For example, you may also find editorials, literature reviews, and book reviews.

So is there a way to tell if an article is a research article? YES!

Parts of a science research article

Abstract

Introduction

Methods (or Methodology or Materials and Methods)

Results

Discussion

Finding science journal articles in databases

Academic Search Premier

Biggest general database for peer-reviewed articles.

CINAHL w/ Full Text

Database of health-related peer-reviewed articles

GreenFILE

Great database for environmental science articles

Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition

Good source for peer-reviewed health and medicine related articles

a quick word about search terms…

• Searching databases is different than searching Google

• Avoid long strings of words, avoid sentences or phrases

• Think about the concepts you want to search. What’s the shortest way of expressing

• Use Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT, *, “”) to build complex searches out of simple keywords

If your topic is the effects of smoking cigarettes, try breaking that down into short keywords separated by the Boolean Operator AND:

Smoking AND effect

You may also want to experiment with different search terms:

Cigarettes AND effectSmoking OR cigarettes AND health(Tobacco OR smoking) AND (cancer OR effect)

The more you play around with your search terms, the better your search results will be.

a quick word about setting up searches in databases…

0

Always mark off the “Full Text” box. Otherwise, you’ll get search returns for articles you can’t access.

Always mark off the “Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals” box. Otherwise, you’ll get search returns for articles that aren’t from peer reviewed publications