You can use a reference manager to collect, organize, and annotate the sources you find in your own personal library. When you go to write, these managers will also generate and format your citations for you.
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I highly recommend using Zotero. You can install the desktop version on your device.
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Just need one citation quickly formatted? |
When it comes times to present your article for a broad audience, you can find background information from books and book chapters. You can look to reporting on scientific stories in newspapers, popular science magazines, and chemistry trade publications for inspiration. And there are many science communicators online who create materials accessible to everyone!
There's more information on the Finding Books and E-Books page about finding books through our library catalog (Primo Search).
You can also look at the Finding Chemistry in the News page for more contextual information. Chemical & Engineering News is a particularly helpful place to browse for ideas.
There are many ways to find more sources linked to the article you've chosen. One newer AI tool that might be useful is ResearchRabbit because it can quickly show you a map of how your chosen article is related to other published works. This tool is free, but you need to create an account.
Try adding the digital object identifier (DOI) of your chosen article into ResearchRabbit. You might find the DOI at the end of a link, like this: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04225-4
Click the purple arrows below to learn more about the browsing options in ResearchRabbit.
If you want to use your chosen source to find related articles through other means, including using curated literature databases, I recorded a video last year that might be a helpful place to start. My favorite database for using the "citation chaining" method is Web of Science, where you can tracking a scientific idea through time using citations very easily. Always feel free to reach out to me for more help!
Nolan: "Using One Source to Find More with Citation Chaining" on Vimeo
Unlike some of the literature databases your library pays subscriptions for, which are curated, all kinds of sources can show up in Google Scholar and ResearchRabbit.
The fact that these tools are not curated doesn't mean that they are not useful, but you should be aware that not every result is a peer reviewed article.
When I was exploring, I found examples of all these source types in my results:
| Almost always peer reviewed | Sometimes peer reviewed | Almost never peer reviewed | Not peer reviewed and trying to deceive you |
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Check out the Types of Sources page to find descriptions of these source types and how they are used in science.
You can find more information about determining if something is peer reviewed on the Evaluating Sources page.
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