Reading
Tips on Reading/Organizing Journal Articles
- Google "How to read a journal article" and you'll get lots of tips and advice.
- Use the PAT. Wonderful tool to help summarize a paper. https://marialuisaaliotta.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/paper-annotation-tool-sheet1.pdf
- This site has lots of ideas. http://www.raulpacheco.org/resources/literature-reviews/
- Especially this article may be helpful. http://www.raulpacheco.org/2017/04/how-to-undertake-a-literature-review/
- Use some software to organize articles, such as Mendeley or Zotero. You can tag and organize articles, which helps when you have many articles to keep track of.
- Another idea - https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/organizing-your-literature-spreadsheet-style
- A wonderful youtube video (about 30 minutes) that provides a good approach to reading a paper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYRhfW5vvK8&ab_channel=NIHOITE
How to Perform a Literature Search
When you want to know what other people have done or find information you need to perform a literature search. Here’s a few tips.
1. Use Google, using terms like “DFT and catalysis”, “DFT and zeolites”, “DFT and MgO”, “density functional theory and TiO2”, “water-gas shift reaction”, etc. Or search by author “Thomson R*” or “Deskins”, etc. Google Scholar is also useful since it searches academic journals.
2. Isiknowledge This is a great resource. You can do a very good search here and even download citation information to EndnoteWeb or other bibliography software.
Besides searching for a specific topic or paper, you can look at citations. For example, I may have an article from 2002. If I look up this article in isiknowledge I can see which papers published since 2002 have cited this article. This is very useful to find articles of interest.
3. Other resources http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/Library/ The internet also has many good resources (search “literature search”).
Resources
Media:Journal-Article-Summary.pdf A description of the format for journal articles.
WPI Libguide A great resource from the library.
