STS 3740 Life Science and Modern Society

Just for fun

• The Joy of Books
• 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.
  • 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!

• Zotero and Mendeley are other options

• Library Footnotes, Bibliographies, RefWorks page

• Plan B: various style guides & Landmarks Citation Machine

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

• Try this: Coolest thing ever Firefox extension call Libx
  • a cool way to search Scholarsportal article database

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

My topic: role of Rosalind Franklin in discovering DNA

• pick a topic that interests you
• narrow your topic
• get a angle/perspective
• have a plan B (autism/vaccine connection or eugenics in Canada) (Huffington Post)

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 keyword:
  • rosalind franklin
  • dna and history
  • genetics and history
  • biology and history
  • james watson
  • rosalind franklin and james watson
  • autism
  • autism and mercury
  • autism and vaccines

• Scholars Portal eBooks — more 1000s or ebooks.  Don’t forget to search with Full Text checked
• Give Google Books Search a try to find more obscure topics! don’t forget, you can borrow books we don’t have via Racer

Finding Articles

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

• rosalind franklin
• dna and history
• genetics and history
• biology and history
• james watson
• rosalind franklin and james watson
• rosalind franklin and dna and history and watson
• autism and mercury and vaccines

A list of the best databases for general science topics

• Scholars Portal Journals — good general source with full text
• JSTOR — full text of various science & science studies journals, best source for STS articles
• Pubmed — article search engine focused on medical, biomedical and clinical, mostly useful for non-historical topics
• Biological Abstracts — general life science search engine, mostly for non-human biology
• History of Science, Technology & Medicine — most comprehensive and complete source for historical topics, covers books and journals.  No full text directly in the database.
• Academic OneFile — good general, full text
• Expanded Academic– good general source, good for book reviews, mostly full text
• Research Libray — another good general source, lots of full text
• Web of Science — Very good coverage of all humanities & social sciences, good for book reviews & for citation tracking

Newspapers

• New York Times deep archives 1851 – 2003.
• London Times Digital archives 1785-1985.
• Factiva: has deep archive for Globe and Mail from late 1970s, may be easier to search

• Canadian Newsstand — Canadian newspaper articles
• Lexis Nexis Academic — good international newspaper coverage

• Toronto Star, 1894-2004
• Globe and Mail, 1884-2002

• York Libraries Newspapers page

Using the Internet Wisely

• ScienceBlogs — blog aggregation site for science (good for controversy and commentary)
• 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
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