WRITING 2 - Sciences Unit
Winter 2005

This is a very general outline of the steps you'll be taking in your library research. If you have any questions along the way, please contact your instructor or one of the reference librarians

STEP ONE: CHOOSING A TOPIC

You may want to explore a topic before you begin your research. Subject encyclopedias and other reference books are often good places to find concise, easily accessible background information that can help you get an overview of your subject. Most of the below examples are located in the Reference Department and cannot be checked out; check Pegasus to find similar titles in the library stacks.

• Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine
  SEL Ref RC41 G35 1999
• Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Growth and Development
  SEL Ref QP84 C26 1998
• Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
  Main Ref BF31 E52 2001
• A Companion to Genethics
  SEL Ref QH438.7 C645 2002
• Encyclopedia of Drugs, Alcohol, and Addictive Behavior
  Main Ref HV5804 E53 2001

STEP TWO: CREATING YOUR SEARCH STRATEGY

Now what? Once you have an idea of what you want to write about, state your topic as a question to help you develop a search strategy for finding information. For example, if you are interested in drug use in professional sports, you might pose the question "Do performance-enhancing drugs affect attitude or behavior in athletes?" You can fill out this worksheet to help you build your search strategy.

1. Choose your research topic
2. Create a research question
3. Identify the key terms or concepts.
4. Try to come up with similiar terms or concepts.
5. Experiment with the truncation symbol to pick up alternate endings. This is usually an asterisk (*).
6. Connect similar concepts with OR. For example, youth OR teenagers OR adolescents.
7. Connect different concepts with AND. For example, youth AND drugs AND behavior.

STEP THREE: WHERE TO SEARCH

Books
Use Pegasus to find books and other materials at the UCSB Libraries. Keyword searches are a good way to begin exploring any library catalog, especially if you don't know the exact wording of your subject. When you find a title that interests you or that seems to be close to your topic, click it to open up the full bibliographic record. You can now examine the subject entries which will give you ideas for other search terms and synonyms. The * symbol is used in most catalogs and databases and will pick up alternate endings to a word, so that athlet* will find athlete, athletes, athletics, athleticism and so forth. Examples:

• teenagers and steroids
• doping and sports
• drugs and athlet*
• behavior and drugs and sport*

Articles
Use an index to find citations to articles from journals, magazines, conferences, and books. There are hundreds of these indexes, both online and in print form; the trick is trying to figure out which ones to use. Below is a list of some of the most commonly-used indexes for general research.
NOTE: Not all the citations you find will be linked to the full text of the article. You may have to track down the print copy of the journal in the library stacks by looking up the journal title in pegasus and noting the call number. You can also click the orange UC-eLinks icon to link to the Melvyl catalog and -- if it's available -- to the article itself. If you wish to use article databases from off campus, you must set up the Proxy Server

• Expanded Academic Index A good place to start. This is a general index, unlike most of the others that focus on a particular discipline, so you’ll find citations here from journals covering all subjects. Type your keywords (e.g. “sports and drug* and behavior”) and hit enter. Many of the resulting citations will include the full text online, in which case you will see a little page icon with a folded corner. Click the icon and you’ll have the entire article. If the icon has an A or a C within it, you will get just an Abstract or a Citation, and will have to look for the print version of the journal in the library. Do this by searching for the journal title in Pegasus, then note the call number.
• PsycInfo Use the Advanced Search (navy button on the lower left) and enter your search terms in the keyword boxes. You can take them directly from the worksheet that you filled out in #2 above. Most of the results will be citations to journal articles, but some articles may be available online: check for the “full-text” link in the yellow band above each citation.
• PubMed Citations and abstracts to over 11 million articles in medicine and life science. The abstracts accompanying the citations are a useful way to determine whether an article is close enough to your subject that you want to track it down. Use the orange “UC-eLinks” link, or type the journal title into a Pegasus search to see if we have a particular article at UCSB.
• Sociological Abstracts Search as in PsycInfo above.
• Biological Sciences Database Search as in PsycInfo above.
• Biosis Previews This database is a little tricky. Try entering your keywords as separate searches, then use the "combine" icon at the top of the page to merge the records.

Internet
The Internet can be a great source for information, but be careful: not every website has accurate or reliable information. Ask yourself if the website is authoritative and accurate. How do you know? Can you figure out who wrote it, and whether it's been updated recently? Pay attention to domain names -- a website name ending in .edu or .gov may well be more authoritative than a .com or .org , but not necessarily. Use a website evaluation checklists such as USM website evaluation and Johns Hopkins website evaluation before citing information from the Internet.