Researching your topic means using more than websites. Your references must include textbooks, journal articles, websites and appropriate experts on your topic. This project requires similar referencing expectations as your junior research paper.
Most research builds on the work of others and your project should contain at least some original or novel elements and clearly present your contribution.
Researching your topic cannot be done on a single search engine. It is expected that you will conduct your literature search at the University of Delaware, the Media Center and/or other libraries. If you are uncertain of a scientific topic, you are reminded to search using the topic “science fair projects” and/or the Charter website of previous senior research presentations for ideas.
A scientific and mathematical search engine that you should access is www.scirus.com.
If you chose to use Google, limit your searches to Google Scholar and Google Books.
Google Scholar (http:’’scholar.google.com/) provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
Google Books (http://books.google.com/) provides researchers a way to search the text of some of the world’s largest research libraries, including the University of California, Harvard, the University of Michigan, New York Public Library, Oxford Universities, Stanford, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin and Madrid’s Complutense University. For books protected by copyright, users get the basic background (such as the book’s title and the author’s name); at most a few lines of text related to their search, and information about where they can borrow or buy the book. Anyone can freely view, browse and read the public domain books.
Wikipedia searches may generate sources that are not legitimate scientific research. You are strongly discouraged from using this search unless the journal or article comes from a .gov or .edu site.
Other additional sites include:
- http://nsdl.org/asknsdl is the National Science Foundation's online library of resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
- teachers.redclay.k12.de.us/mary.tise/ which is the link to The Media Center at school. Find links to the catalogs of various libraries in New Castle County, as well as full-text journal databases available through UDLibSEARCH.
- www.firstgov.gov is the main website for the Government.
- http://www.co.new-castle.de.us/library/home/webpage12.asp is the link to databases available through the public library system. To access these, use your public library card.