Skip to main content
Skip to main content
Glendon Campus Alumni Research Giving to York Media Careers International York U Lions Accessibility
Future Students Current Students Faculty and Staff
Faculties Libraries York U Organization Directory Site Index Campus Maps

NATS 1760 — Science, Technology and Society (Slater)

Just for fun

FREE Citation Management Software
  • RefWorks site (Login) can help you manage your footnotes & bibliography on the web. Easy to use, interfaces directly with MS Word to create footnotes & bibliographies
    • For off campus use, get the York group code here.
    • FAQ and Instructions for various databases
    • RefWorks Tutorial
    • For ACM Digital Library & other databases like dblp, you can import from the bibtex format.
      • Use the References–>Import Feature
  • Key points:
  • Don’t forget to install Write-n-Cite on your PC. It’s in the Tools menu
  • Also don’t forget to move items out of the “Last Imported” folder into the folder you create for your course
  • Lastly, don’t forget to use “Edit citation” in the Write-n-cite application to get page numbers!

Logging in from Home
  • Need to use Passport York or bar code number & PIN from library card to authenticate as a York user
  • Information here on logging in
  • Remember: Use the library web page or this blog post for the link as it will prompt for login

Background Information

Finding Books

My topic:  alternative energy sources — biofuels: are they worth it

  • pick a topic that interests you
  • narrow your topic
  • get a angle/perspective
  • have a plan B (science & religion: teaching creationism in schools)

Do a search in The York Catalogue:

  • by title: The citizen-powered energy handbook : community solutions to a global crisis
  • by author: pahl greg
  • by journal title: Scientific American
  • by subject: Renewable energy sources
  • by subject: biomass energy
  • by keyword:
    • biofuel*
    • biodiesel
    • biofuel and economics
    • biofuel and (efficiency or viability)
    • biofuel and efficiency and carbon footprint
    • science and religion
    • science and creationism and education
    • creationism and evolution and high school
    • scopes trial
    • scopes and trial
    • creationism and trials
  • Google Books Search — lets you search inside books for obscure topics
    • RACER to get books we don’t have. It usually only takes a couple of days to get the book if another ON university has it.
  • Books 24×7 is a very comprehensive ebooks package

Finding Articles

All the article databases are similar. Try searches like these.

  • ethanol
  • ethanol and production
  • biofuels and efficiency
  • biofuels and cost
  • biodiesel and food and cost
  • (biodiesel or biofuel*) and cost and corn
  • ethanol and cost and corn
  • scopes and trial and bryan
  • trial and evolution and school

A list of the best databases for general science topics

  • Scholar’s Portal Journals: full text, good general source of articles
  • Scopus — good complement to Scholars Portal — not completely full text but covers a broader range
  • IEEE Xplore — full text engineering database
  • JSTOR — good full text, better for historical topics
    • Remember: don’t use basic search, advanced only!

Newspapers — can often find primary historical sources

Using the Internet Wisely
  • ScienceBlogs — blog aggregation site for science
  • Using Google as a scholarly research tool:
    • Find a good portal site
    • remember: who, why and when
  • Wikipedia — solid source of links & basic info, not academic or 100% reliable Wikipedia as a starting point. Remember that for a controversial topic there can be a lot of back and forth and “conflict of interest” changes

Office: Steacie 102H
Email: jdupuis@yorku.ca
MSN IM: john_dupuis@hotmail.com
You can also friend me or send me a message on Facebook.

And on FriendFeed and Twitter.

Steacie also has a page on Facebook and a Twitter account– become a fan!