Juggling Research

Getting Started with Background Research

While not all content here will be peer-reviewed, the following resources can be a great place to brainstorm research questions, identify search terms, or explore a general field.

• • Science in Context (Gale)

  • Topics important in science today. Includes reference materials, magazines, journals, multimedia, websites, and more.

  • Science Online (Facts on File)

  • Covers all scientific disciplines, including biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, physics, and more. Definitions, biographies, news, and experiments.

• Wikipedia

  • Surprised to see a teacher recommend Wikipedia? While you shouldn't cite it as a final source for your project, and you'll need to verify any claims you see, Wikipedia can be very useful for getting familiar with a topic or finding additional resources.

Resources for Scholarly Articles

Once you have basic familiarity with your topic, you're ready to tackle these sources for scholarly articles.

• • Academic OneFile (Gale)

  • Your source for peer-reviewed, full-text academic articles from leading journals in a wide variety of subjects, from science and technology to the arts and theology.

  • PubMed Central (National Center for Biotechnology Information)

  • PubMed contains "more than 21 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books." PubMed Central will show you only articles that are available online, whereas the regular PubMed includes citations for many more, which can be requested through inter-library loan.

  • Google Scholar

  • You won't have immediate, free access to most of these articles, but if you find the perfect source, we can try an inter-library loan request on your behalf. Not for procrastinators!

Scholarly and Popular Sources

What's the difference? Why is it important? This presentation should help.

Search Tips

Combine keywords to get articles that match each of your important concepts. For example, if you are researching alternative treatments for blood cancer:

alternative treatments AND blood cancer

Use quotation marks to find complete phrases, especially proper names and titles. For example:

"muscular dystrophy" or "genetic causes"

Filter for full-text articles. Don't waste your time on articles we don't have. Set your results to show only articles where the full-text is freely available. And pay attention to what you retrieve: not every article published in a peer-reviewed journal is itself peer-reviewed, for example, there may also be book reviews, news reports, etc.

Brainstorm related terms. Consider using a thesaurus or background sources like Wikipedia to come up with synonyms. Experiment with using broader and narrower terms as well. For example, consider "cancer" versus "leukemia" versus "acute myelogenous leukemia."

Use truncation. In many databases, an asterisk will find all words with the same root. For example: juggl* will find ... what?

Check your spelling. If you don't find anything on your topic, sloppy spelling may be to blame!

Citing Sources & Academic Integrity

Why cite sources? In addition to avoiding the severe consequences of plagiarism and increasing our own credibility, we are participating in part of an ongoing scholarly conversation. It is important for your readers to be able to find your sources, so they can enter into the dialogue as well.

Your school subscription to EasyBib (see Ms. Kitsis if you need to register) can help you format and track citations.

Happy Juggling!

Other resources for help with citations:

• Arlington High School Guide to Student Research Projects

  • Created by Arlington High School teachers for Arlington High School students, this guide explains the research process and what will be expected of you.

• Research and Documentation Online

  • Detailed explanation of in-text citations and works cited entries in perfect MLA format for a wide variety of sources.

Anatomy of a Database Citation

Most of your sources will come from article databases. Database articles are NOT cited like websites! Here is a sample database article citation in MLA format:

Sanders, Rogier W. "HIV Takes Double Hit Before Entry." BMC Biology 10 (2013): 99. Academic OneFile. Web. 13 Feb. 2013.

And these are the parts:

Author last name, first name. "Title of article." Journal title volume and issue (date of publication): page numbers. Database name. Medium. Date of access.

See the research site from Bedford/St. Martin's has other examples.

Tip: Most of our databases provide a formatted citation at the bottom of the article, which you can copy and paste into your works cited page. Just be sure it's using the same format as required by your teacher.

Not All Journals Are Created Equal

From the New York Times:

The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects.

But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e-mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé.

“I think we were duped,” one of the scientists wrote in an e-mail to the Entomological Society.

Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events.

Read the full article, Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too).