Chemistry & Biochemistry Research Guide

"Click chemistry is kind of like legos".  [Image source.]

Activity Instructions:

1. You'll be separated into 4 groups, and each group will be assigned one of the databases below.
2. You and your group will perform a speed-searching sequence:
   1. Find one review article on a topic related to click chemistry
   2. Use your review's references to identify a primary research article
   3. Try to find that article in your database. (If you can't find it in your database, you can try the main catalog next. If you can't find it in the catalog, try Google Scholar.)
3. For each search level, the focus is less on the topics or the articles and more on the experience of using the database and exercising some advanced search skills. I will not be judging anyone based on specific articles you find!
4. Take a look around the database. What's it like to use? What search features do you notice that could be helpful? How much information can you get about individual articles? Can you get full text? Click around!
5. As a group, you'll share with your classmates:
   1. the basic results of your two searches: could you find a review article? could you use that review article to find a primary article?
   2. Tell us a little about your search: what keywords did you use? What other tools did your database provide to help you refine your search?
   3. How were you able to identify the review as a review, and the primary article as primary?
   4. one thing you liked or thought was interesting about the database you were assigned, and
   5. one thing you didn't like or had a question about.

Imace (c) CC BY Nicole Gustavsen, 

You can use Boolean logic as part of your search strategy to easily scope your searching to bring back more relevant results. The AND operator is used to narrow results, while the OR operator is used to expand them. You can also use the NOT operator to exclude particular search terms from a pool of results. Other tools include quote search (search for a phrase "in quotes" to find that exact phrase), and wildcard (search for all possible endings of a word at once using the asterisk: wild* brings back wilds, wildcard, wilderness, wildland, etc).

Image from "How to Read a Book" by Paul N. Edwards.

This illustration demonstrates the tendency of scholarly information to be organized so that more general or broad information is found at the beginning and the end (say, the introduction and conclusion sections) while more specific information (such as methodologies) is found in the middle. Knowing this structure can help us read strategically.