The purpose of this guide is to give students studying in the sciences, technology, engineering, and math the tools to understand how information in these fields works. Early-career scientists and engineers with a functional knowledge of how information functions in their field will be able to find, understand, and implement sources for a variety of purposes, and will be able to synthesize existing data to create something new.
In this guide we'll investigate:
Different fields make use of different types of information. Engineers make use of technical standards; physicists often work with very large datasets; chemists need access to chemical property information from specialized databases. Computer science and mathematics research is often published in conference proceedings while biology research is usually published in academic journal articles. Due both to the nature of the work, and to the long-standing cultures that are unique to each field, a variety of information types are in regular use. This type of knowledge isn't always taught deliberately in college, but it's essential for success in any scientific or technical career.