Choosing the Right Tool

How to choose the right tool is a skill you should attempt to cultivate in your students; choosing the right tools to teach is your job.

Criteria

• What questions do the students need to answer?
  • Individual pieces of data - concentrate on handbooks, tables, etc.
  • Introductory or overview information - How to find books, reviews, treatises and encyclopedic works.
  • Original research - Basic indexes and abstracts
  • Comprehensive study of original research - Sophisticated use of major indexes, plus specialized indexes
• What tools are available?
  • Lower division undergraduates - concentrate on local reference collection, readily available electronic sources.
  • Researchers (upper-division chem. majors, graduate students and up) - introduce other resources which they may have access to now or later in their careers.

Teaching approaches

• Build from the familiar and/or easy to use to the unfamiliar and/or tricky to use.
• Show how easy to use sources can help with harder to use sources. Examples:
  • Beilstein references in CRC Handbook, Aldrich catalog
  • Synonym indexes and Chemical Abstracts names in Merck Index, HODOC, DOC
• For original research, teach ways to build on previous searches
  • Use keyword searches in electronic sources to find subject headings.
  • Use bibliographies and footnotes to build backward in time; Science Citation Index to build forward in time.