5 Scholarly Science Search Engines for the College Student's Toolbox


The other day, a college student related to me that his college professor advised him that he needs to use more scholarly resources for his science research project.

"What do you recommend?", he asked.

I love this kind of question!

Here are five science search engines I think should be in every college (and high school) student's research toolbox:

The search engine Scirus. "With over 545 million scientific items indexed at last count, it allows researchers to search for not only journal content but also scientists' homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information."

www.scirus.com

Google Scholar. "Provides a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles" (search tips)


Science.gov. USA.gov for Science - Government Science Portal. "Science.gov searches over 55 databases and over 2100 selected websites from 13 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results."


WorldWideScience. "A global science gateway comprised of national and international scientific databases and portals."


The National Science Digital Library. "Serving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education". This resource is geared for teachers, but students can tap into this goldmine too!



What would you add to this list?

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@mauilibrarian2 

Image: http://pixabay.com/static/uploads/photo/2012/04/02/13/31/chemical-24497_640.png


Google+ Tip: How to Adjust the Flow of Information from your Circles -- A Snapshot


I just created this Skitch snapshot for our faculty, to show them how to adjust the flow of information from the Google+ circles they created, and I thought others might find the shot useful as well. Feel free to download and share it.

Here are the steps in writing:

1. Go to Home.
2. Choose the Circle (which you've already created) you want to adjust.
3. Circle members will appear on the right.
4. Adjust the post stream and notifications as you wish.

  • Decide whether you want posts to show in your Home stream.
  • Notice that 'Amount of posts' shown in home stream is on a sliding scale of Fewer / Standard / More.
  • If you decide NOT to check 'Get notified about new posts', notifications will appear only at the upper right. 

5. If you decide to check 'Get notified about new posts', you will receive email notification as well.

The set-up shown above is for maximum I-don't-want-to-miss-a-thing flow of information.

Learning about Google+ is FUN.

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@mauilibrarian2 


The theme was eBooks and these are my favorite tweets from #tlchat April 15, 2013

 


The topic tonight for the monthly #tlchat was:

EBooks: Advice, Resources, Recommendations, Marketing, etc.

and these are my favorite tweets:



























Here's the full archive done so beautifully in Evernote, by Nikki Robertson:

TLChat 4/15/2013


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@mauilibrarian2

How to Make Sure You're Sharing a Google Doc With the Right People

That little 'Change' link at the bottom of the Google doc share box? I didn't know about it. And, well, it's important!

You definitely want to decide whether the people you share with have the capability of adding people or changing permissions.


Colleague Moka Brown, who shares docs with her science students using Doctopus, pointed out that little link during a Middle School faculty presentation yesterday. Thanks, Moka!

Here's a 1-minute screencast I did to demonstrate:




(Yes, those are chickens crowing in the background )

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@mauilibrarian2