Introduction to Natural Sciences Fall 2007
I. Finding the original research article which is reported in your source
A. If you are lucky and there is a full bibliographic citation for the primary research article, go straight to the Library Catalog and use the Journal Title search to input the title of the journal you seek.
- If it is listed, there may be many links to various on-line versions of the journal. Look for a link which covers the date you need.
- If the journal is not listed in our collection, go straight to the Illiad subsystem to order the article from interlibrary loan (there's a link to Illiad on the Library Catalog page)
B. If the report gives only partial clues about the original research, use those clues as search elements in one of the broad, very current science databases provided by the library (a quick Google search to help flesh out the citation might not be a bad strategy before you get started in the journal databases).
- Science Direct
- BioOne
- JSTOR (best for older articles)
- To find additional science databases, go to Reference & Journals/Subject Categories and select science or more specific topics to get to lists of relevant databases
II. Tracing the network of related published research
A. With the original article in hand OR with the citation for the original go to the Web of Science and search the article. You will get a list of the citations within the article. Identify the earliest that seems directly relevant to your topic.
B. Do a "Cited Reference" search on the earlier work(s) which led up to the research you started with. The result will be articles which cited the earlier work and therefore were following up, furthering or critiquing the earlier work.
Note: the Web of Science is the first and most thorough index based on connecting citations from work to work. Other databases such as JSTOR are starting to take advantage of this early, text-based form of linking. Thus, you may that many databases will start to allow you to track these connections.