LibGuides: Computer Science &amp; Engineering Research Guide: CPSC 315 (Johnson, Sp24)

"How to share a secret": Database discovery activity

Activity description:

You'll be split into four groups. Each group will explore a different database, using the same article as a starting point. The purpose of this activity is for all of you to try out new databases and learn from each other about how each of them have different functions and features. You'll use the spreadsheet below to follow the steps and document your findings for each other.

Activity instructions:

Open your team's assigned database.
Try to locate the original text of "How to Share a Secret" by Adi Shamir (1979).
Answer each question sequentially. There are 4 yes/no questions, and 5 free-text questions.
When every group is finished, each will have 3-ish minutes to present its findings to the class.
Remember: the goal isn't to find any "right" answers. We're just trying to test out each database to see what it can do (or can't).

Google Sheets: "How to share a secret" database activity

Databases

Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library This link opens in a new window
The ACM Digital Library is a comprehensive database covering computing and information technology. The repository includes the complete collection of ACM publications plus an extended bibliographic database of core works in computing from scholarly publishers.

Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
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Google Scholar is freely available, and is not a Foley Library database.

MathSciNet This link opens in a new window
MathSciNet is a database from the American Mathematical Society (AMS) which provides indexing, abstracts, and reviews for much of the mathematical sciences literature, and includes Mathematical Reviews, which publishes over 40,000 expert reviews of currently published literature per year.
Web of Science/Web of Knowledge This link opens in a new window
A multidisciplinary database for leading journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences and sciences. Use this database to identify the number of citations to articles in scholarly journals as well as locating all cited references captured from indexed journals.