CHE 333: Organic Chemistry III (Lund)

1. First read the Introduction to get an idea of the relevancy of the research to your topic. What about the Abstract? Read it last not to become biased by the author’s interpretation of results.
2. It’s time to ask a general question. Instead of asking “What this paper is about?”, try to think broader and ask: “What problem is this entire field trying to solve?”
3. Identify the background of this research: what work has been done before and what needs to be done in the future?
4. Now ask a specific question: what exactly are the authors trying to prove with their research?
5. Next determine what exactly are the authors going to do to answer this specific question
6. It’s time to read the Methods section. If it helps to understand and replicate the experiment, try drawing the diagrams in the article
7.  Read the Results section. Write a paragraph summarizing the results for each experiment, figure, and table. Try to understand what the results are, not yet what they mean
8. What do you think – do the results answer the specific question? Start forming your own ideas before you read the author’s interpretation
9. Read the conclusion/discussion section. What do the authors think the results are? Do you agree? What are the next steps proposed? What do you think?
10. Now read the Abstract. Does it match what the author said in this paper? Does it match your interpretation?
11. Check the References section next. What other research articles did the author cite? And who is citing this paper? Try to find the citation chain. Do the authors who cite this paper support or criticize it? Discovering the citation chain will help you identify other papers in the field and find sources of useful ideas and techniques.

Adapted from https://guides.library.wheaton.edu/CHM241Umesiri

1. Start by accessing the database on the library home page https://www.oit.edu/library.
2. Go to Electronic Resources and select the database from the list.
3. To determine what index terms the database uses, go to Thesaurus on top left of your screen.
4. In the “Browsing” box type “pesticides”. Click “Browse” button.
5. The Thesaurus will show all the relevant terms for “pesticides”. 
6. The narrower terms can give you ideas on possible topics to explore: “application of pesticides”, “pesticide pollution”, etc. I choose “Physiological effects of pesticides”. I select this term, and click on “Add” button. The term will appear on top of the page, in the Search box. Click on “Search” button. 
7. My search will retrieve very precise results. It will look for the selected terms only in one field of the article records: “Subjects”.
8. You can further narrow down the results by choosing limiters on the left of your screen, such as the articles published in the recent years and the articles published in the Academic Journals (which usually means peer-reviewed).
9. To decide whether the article answers your research need, check the title, subjects, and the abstract.

1. Start by accessing the database on the library home page https://www.oit.edu/library. Go to Electronic resources and select the database on the list. Select Advanced Search mode.
2. The Advanced Search brings you more options to combine your keywords, and also more options to limit the results to more relevant. For example, you can select date range, audience, type of publication, etc., before you search. Type in your keywords in the search boxes.
3. This type of search will retrieve more results than the Subject search, as it will look in several fields of article records: title, subjects and abstract.