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CHEM 110: Core Concepts in Context

Quick Start

Quick starts for choosing a topic include:

  1. Browsing C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News) for topics of interest and working backwards to discover the chemistry.  You can search by Topics or the current issue.  Two additional sections that are great for browsing are:
  2. Identifying a chemical concept by browsing your text book or others in the library collection and search to where it is applied in the real world.  Some example titles include:

The process

Selecting your topic is one of the hardest parts of the research process.  As you do research you will have to narrow or expand your topic, modify it, or change focus.  Meeting with a librarian at this point in the research process can help you with determine where to start your research.  

1.  Pick a Topic

  • skim titles
  • read abstracts
  • review reference materials
  • do a quick google search
  • revisit topics from an earlier class
  • explore your textbook

2.  Find and Read Sources

  • Databases are collections of article, often discipline specific, that allow you to search across a large number of journals at one time. 

  • Journal articles are written about original research and are shorter and more specific than review articles or books.

3.  Test the topic

4.  ReSearch your topic

This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. Published July 2014

Search Tips

 For concepts:

  • AND = Broad concepts
  • OR = Synonyms & related concepts
  • NOT = Narrow concepts

 For Words:

  • Truncation: smok* =  smoke, smoked, smoker, smokers, smoking
  • Phrase Searching: "computer science" = these two words are searched as a single phrase

 Examples:

 (“artificial intelligence” OR robot*) AND (behaviour or behaviror)
 

Licensed Under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.