APSC 350- Cotten

These are not normal times, but my colleagues at W&M Libraries and I will do everything we can to help you complete your research project.  If the full text of an article is not immediately available to you online, you can request it through interlibrary loan. We will do our best to find an electronic version for you.  You can also use the IM chat box on this page to contact a librarian, or set up a research consultation.

1. KEYWORD.  Try different and related terms:  "drug development", "drug design", "drug discovery"
2. AUTHOR.  Researchers tend to specialize, so look for other articles written by an author whose article you found useful.
3. SUBJECT HEADING.  See what words the indexer used to categorize a useful article; click that category to find other articles that have been similarly tagged.  3 minute video on how to do this
4. CITATIONS.  Look at the bibliography of a scholarly article and find the sources it used.
5. CITED BY. Use Web of Science to see more recent articles that have cited a useful source. If those authors found it useful too, you might like the authors' article.

In the sciences, we have access to two different kinds of search engines:

1. Publisher Aggregates.  Publishers of scientific journals tend to specialize in that area, so you can search for your topic in a particular publisher and be pretty sure you'll be looking mostly at scholarly, scientific articles.  PRO: Articles will be full text (dates depend on our subscription).  CON: Searching is usually limited to keywords.

2. Subject Databases.  Companies like EBSCO and ProQuest work with thousands of publishers to index their articles and put them into subject databases.  PRO: More article records, more sophisticated searching available because of indexing  CON: Some records do not have full text.