WRI: Writing an Effective Scientific Research Article: Science & Engineering: The Basics

To familiarize yourself with the broader landscape of a research field, especially if your work will have applications in other disciplines, go to the basics:

• AccessScience - The McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
• Annual Reviews - Series of authoritative, analytic reviews in 33 focused disciplines within the Biomedical, Physical, and Social Sciences. Useful for researching engineering applications in physical sciences.
• Foundations and Trends in Business, Economics and Technology - Gateway to the primary research literature, combining peer-reviewed expertise, the breadth of reference works, and the pedagogy of textbooks.
• Synthesis and Colloguium Digital Library (Morgan & Claypool) - Collection of lectures that synthesize various research or development topics in biomedical engineering, communications, artificial intelligence, computer science, and electrical engineering.
• ScienceWatch.com - Summarized Publication and Citation Data from Thomson Scientific for the Analysis of Research Trends & Performance. Visual representations of leading scientific literature track the ground breaking papers in various scientific fields.

Google Scholar  

• search engine which Indexes scholarly literature in many disciplines
• For many scholarly journals, links directly to the article
• Includes cited references like the Web of Science database
• Advanced search allows discipline, author, date, and other searches
• Integrated with Findit@PUL
  
• Includes links to JSTOR and Elsevier journals

Set Your Preferences for Google Scholar

• Before you search use Settings to set up on "Find It" functions. 
• Search Princeton in the Library Links box and make sure box is checked           
• WorldCat - set default for off-campus access to "Library Search"
• Select preferred citation manager
• If you use RefWorks or EndNote, choose your option in the bibliography section
• Then Save Preferences

Princeton Users:
Find scholarly articles in journals and newspapers not in Google by searching Databases. You can also browse databases at the library by Subject.

Directions to access Princeton-only articles from off-campus
http://library.princeton.edu/help/remoteaccess.php

Google Scholar

•    Scholarly focus
•     Academic publishers
•     Professional papers and conference proceedings
•     Online journals and reprinted articles
•      Use the Advanced Search for better searching

Set Your Preferences for Google Scholar

•      Before you search use Settings to set up on PUL access links (FindIt@PUL)      
•      Search Princeton in the Library Links box and make sure box is checked
•      WorldCat - set default for off-campus access to "Library Search"
•      Select preferred citation manager. If you use RefWorks or EndNote, choose your option in the bibliography section
•      Then Save Preferences

Pros:

•        Relevancy (relevant hits at the top of the list - tend to be older)
•        Web-based materials not in other databases
•        Access to full-text enabled (linked to PUL library resources)
•        Searches a broad cross-section of subjects and disciplines
•        "Cited by" links to works that cite a particular book or article
•        Strong in the Sciences (Engineering, Chemistry, Biology etc)
•        Improving all the time

Cons:

•        Frequency of updates?
•        Gaps in coverage
•        Incomplete Citations (often omit years, issue numbers or journal titles)         
•        Doesn't handle variant spellings of author names or journal titles         
•        No saved searches like many library databases
•        Bias towards older literature - much of which is not full text
•        Exporting citations : Only one at a time