STS 3790 Science and Technology: Global Development Research Session

Open Science Presentation

Open Science Presentation

Fun Stuff!

• 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

• 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
• 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: outsourcing & brain drain  (IT sector, doctors)

• pick a topic that interests you
• narrow your topic — often helpful to start looking at sources to help you narrow
• get a angle/perspective
• have a plan B (exporting electronic waste)
• toolbox approach: books, journal articles, newspapers & magazines, government sources
• Stage One: Relevant Wikipedia articles
  • ewaste
  • outsourcing

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:
  • outsourcing or offshoring
  • outsourcing and IT
  • outsourcing and information and india
  • outsourcing and india
  • outsourc$ and (information or technology)
  • brain drain or skills drain

• Three important books in Steacie reference section:
  • Encyclopedia of information systems — T 58.5 E52 2003
  • Encyclopedia of computer science — QA 76.15 E48 2003
  • Encyclopedia of computers and computer history — QA 76.15 E53 2001
• Books 24×7 — Amazing ebooks package!
• Scholars Portal eBooks — a great big pile of ebooks
• Synthesis — ebook package with several items on technology & society

• Google Book Search is a great tool for finding relevant books
  • outsourcing IT to india
• Use RACER to borrow books that York doesn’t have!

Finding Articles

All the article databases are similar. Try searches like those above.

A list of the best databases for general science/development topics

First of all, check out Subject Research Guides for what makes sense for your topic

• Scholars Portal Journals — good source for journal articles
• ABI/Inform and Business Source Premier — full text business databases that let you follow the money
• Sociological Abstracts — search engine,  good for social aspects of technology
• JSTOR — full text of various science & science studies journals, best source for STS articles
• Scholar’s Portal: mostly full text, good general source of 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.

• ACM Digital Library: lots of comp sci conferences and journals, good for case studies
• IEEE Xplore :good source of full text articles on info tech
  • IEEE technology and society magazine — good resource

General, Interdisciplinary databases

• Academic OneFile — good general, full text
• Expanded Academic– good general source, good for book reviews, mostly full text
• Research Library — 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
• Scopus — similar to web of science, but doesn’t cover humanities and social sciences as well

Newspapers.

• Canadian Newsstand — full text newspaper source
• Lexis Nexis Academic — international news coverage

Government & Non-Governmental Sources

Some sites to check out for Government and NGO information

• World DataBank from the World Bank. Lots of stats, etc.
  • watch for the table/chart options icon to play with output
• SciDev — good site with news & resources on the developing world.
• World Health Organization
• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
• SourceOECD — full text OECD database of books & articles
• United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
• LEAD International — training organization for a sustainable world
• International Institute for Environment and Development
• AccessUN

• York Libraries Government Sources page
• York Libraries Statistical Sources
  

• Science.gov — US portal for science information

Some resources for finding information on specific countries

• Lexis Nexis Academic
  • Go under Reseach Countries, but sources are often a bit old
  • For news, left sidebar Browse sources –>Pick country –>drill down to sources you want
• CIA World Factbook
• US Energy Information Administration
• Libraries’ Energy Statistics Resource Page
• International Energy Agency
• World Competitiveness Yearbook
• BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2010

• Wikipedia — use Wikipedia very critically, more as a source of sources than the final word
  • World Energy Resources and Consumption
  • List of countries by energy consumption per capita

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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