NATS 1745 History of Astronomy

Fun Stuff

• New Spice — Study like a scholar, scholar
• Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet?
• pipl.com
• What does Facebook publish about you and your friends?

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

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!

• FAQ and Instructions for various databases
• RefWorks Tutorial
• Plan B: various style guides & Landmark Citation Machine

Background Information

• Scientific publication cycle
• For bibliographies: various style guides and the Landmark Citation Machine.
• Academic Integrity & Plagiarism web site.
• Encyclopedia Britannica — best general resource
• Oxford Reference Online — lots of online dictionaries in science & other fields

My topic: Kepler Space Telescope

Logging in from Home

• Need to use Passport York or bar code number & PIN from library card to authenticate as 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

Finding Books

• Helps get up to speed on a topic
• Do a search in The York Catalogue:
  • by title: Cost-effective space mission operations
  • by author: Boden Daryl G.
  • by journal title: Scientific American
  • by keyword:
    • telescopes
    • observatories and history
    • telescopes and history
  • New Best Friend for finding information inside books: Googe Book Search
    • kepler and nasa and telescope
  • For ordering/borrowing books we don’t have: RACER.
• Ebooks!
  • Scholars Portal ebook site
    • Don’t forget to click Full Text Only

Articles

• Journal & conference articles give cutting edge, peer reviewed information
  on most topics
• Some searches:

• telescopes
• observatories and history
• telescopes and history
• kepler and telescope
• kepler and nasa
• kepler and nasa and mission

• Science.gov — source of US government reports and articles
• NASA Technical Reports Server
• NASA Astrophysics Data System — master source of astronomy articles.  Doesn’t directly tie into York proxy server so might have to dig to fnd articles off campus
• List of Space Agencies
• JStor — good source of history of science full text
  • Use Advanced Search with categories checked off!!!
• Scholars Portal journals — good general source for mostly full text article
• Web of Science — very good general resources, all the main journals
• Google Scholar — good general source
• Expanded Academic — general
• Research Library — Good general source for journal & magazine articles
• Canadian Newsstand — full text of many Canadian newspapers for the last several years, good for news reports about various topics, can find interesting news coverage for this kind of topic
• Lexis Nexis Academic — international newspaper coverage
• Also deep archives of some papers (try New York Times!):
  • Toronto Star
  • Globe and Mail
  • New York Times

Websites

• Wikipedia: a treasure trove of technical information, created by a community. Not edited or reviewed,so may not be complete or accurate. Tech topics tend to be pretty good.

Using the Internet Wisely

• Using Google as a scholarly research tool:
  • strategy: find good portal sites
  • strategy: make sure you know exactly who produced the content
  • example: waste to energy
• Wikipedia — a free, open source encyclopedia. Surprisingly good for background info but not for more serious reference

• Google Scholar
  • issues: currency (don’t update often), comprehensiveness (won’t say what isn’t in their database)
• Google Book Search
  • great for searching inside all the books and then checking to see if we have the one you want
  • don’t forget, you can borrow books we don’t have via Racer

Office: Steacie 102H
Email: jdupuis@yorku.ca
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