Purpose of Scientific Literature

1
Purpose of Scientific Literature

• Communication between researchers
• Historical record of the progress of scientific
  research
• Avoids duplication of results and methods

2
Why familiarity with the scientific literature is
important

• Allows you to keep up-to-date with current
  scientific findings
• Find deficiencies in current knowledge
• Specific Reasons
• Preparing a literature review for a thesis
• Writing a review article
• Researching for an essay/report      

3
Types of publications

• Books
• Peer-reviewed journals
• General (e.g. Nature or Science)
• Specialist (most common)

4
Peer Review

• also called Refereeing
• Publishers use peer-review to select and screen
  articles submitted to journals
• subjects an author's work or ideas to the
  scrutiny of one or more others who are experts in
  the field.

5
Peer Review (cont.)

• Referees evaluate the work and recommend whether
  or not it should be published
• Some journals are very selective in what they
  publish. Nature, for example, is the most
  prestigious scientific journal and only accepts
  5 of the articles submitted to it.

6
Types of journal article

• Original research article
• Review article
• Letters to editor
• Short communications

7
Structure of a research article 1

• Abstract
• Summary of problem and main results
• Introduction/background
• Understanding and presentation of previous work
  (by others and themselves)
• Clear statement of problem/hypothesis

8
Structure of a research article 2

• Methods Materials
• Detailed enough to allow repetition of study
• Results
• Graphs/tables
• Statistical analyses
• Factual statements about observations

9
Structure of a research article 3

• Discussion
• Implications of the results
• Reference to previous studies
• Answer hypothesis originally stated
• References
• Full details of works referred to in the
  introduction or elsewhere

10
Finding articles on your topic

• Make a list of relevant keywords or known authors
  to search
• Look at available databases and decide which are
  most relevant to your topic

11
Databases

• Very general
• Expanded Academic File
• Ingenta
• General Scientific
• ScienceDirect
• Science Citation Index
• Specialised PubMed (medicine)

12
Types of publications (cont.)

• Conference proceedings
• Specialist publications
• In-house reports
• Patents
• Theses