Before coming to class, please do the following:
If you have any difficulties registering, please contact me for help. During class, I will give a short talk, and then you will have the rest of the time to work on your assignment.
Please combine the following into one PDF in this order:
The purpose of the assignment is to learn about different types of scholarly communications in chemistry, and how to do substance, reference, and author searches to find chemistry research and review articles in SciFinder-n, which is the top literature resource for chemists.
All UNT students are required to register with CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) before using the SciFinder-n database. The whole process takes 10 to 15 minutes. Please register before coming to class on Monday, October 9.
Steps to register:
If you have any difficulties registering for or using Scifinder-n, contact Pilar Baskett at pilar.baskett@unt.edu.
Scholarly communication is the conversation that occurs between scholars, both in written and verbal form. Watch this 3 minute video, Introduction to Scholarly Communication, from the University of Guelph for a full explanation. In chemistry, the communication takes the form of research articles, review articles, conference proceedings, patents, conference presentations, posters, and more. As you learn more about chemistry, you'll be able to start participating in the scholarly conversation. If you've done a conference poster or presentation, you're already contributing to scholarly communication!
For Library Assignment #1, you will be searching in SciFinder-n for only research and review articles, which have gone through the formal peer-review process. Watch this Peer Review in 3 Minutes for an explanation. Research articles are written by the researcher or group of researchers who have completed a study. They are reporting on their own work. Most articles you'll find in SciFinder-n are research articles. Review articles are written by one or more authors after reviewing many research articles in a subject area. They write about trends in that area of research. There are fewer of these in SciFinder-n, and they nearly always have the word "review" in the abstract. You can add "review" to your search in SciFinder-n to easily identify review articles.
Do not include conference proceedings or patents in the article list you are going to compile for Library Assignment #1. Neither of these scholarly communications go through the formal peer review process. Conference proceedings are a collection of abstracts or sometimes full papers presented at a conference. A proceeding can be identified by the conference name in the citation/abstract provided by SciFinder-n A patent is a document submitted to the US Patent and Trademark office (or patent offices in other countries) that describes an invention and may be approved to give the author rights over the invention. A patent in Scifinder-n will have the name of a patent office in its citation.
In Box 3 on this page, you'll learn how to search in SciFinder-n and refine your results to research and review articles only.
Read these short help guides with screenshots to learn how to do substance, reference, and author searching in Scifinder-n. To learn more about the database, explore the additional resources on the Scifinder-n Training page.
3. Select Download at the top right of the results screen.
4. Enter your name and class code for the file name, leave all other options as is, and download as a PDF.
5. SciFinder will produce a PDF that you'll eventually combine with other PDFs and submit to Dr. Slaughter.
SciFinder-n doesn't contain its own full text articles, so you have to follow links to locate the articles in the library's collection. Here's how you do it starting from a results list:
2. When you link to the journal article, locate the PDF icon and download the file.
3. Sometimes the link doesn't connect you to the article, and you'll see a screen like the one below. Use the link, Check the UNT Library Catalog, to see if the library subscribes to the journal and has the right volume for you. If not, then you'll need to select another article for Assignment #1. If you eventually want the article, then order it through Interlibrary Loan using the link, Request This Item through ILLiad.
