Greenleaf wrote:I HAVE A QUESTION!
TYPE OF QUESTION: IB standard level chemistry, but honestly it could apply to other subjects, too.
YOUR QUESTION: does anyone have any tips on how to find peer reviewed sources that are both free and easy to read? It's my own fault for leaving it to the last minute, but my chem teacher needs us to have at least four peer reviewed sources in our bibliography for a project and I can't find any sources anywhere. I've tried JSTOR and Google Scholar and plenty other strange websites but the articles that look helpful are all locked and the articles that are open access are illegible to me. ;-;
When using google scholar, look for links that have [HTML] or [PDF] after the title. Click the html/pdf link - these are usually full text available to you as long as you click the source rather than the title. Ignore any results that don't have the [HTML/PDF] off to the side to save time.
Does your school have a subscription to any place with official journals? You should be able to log in through them off campus to utilize those sources and be able to reach those locked journals you found through jstor and scholar.
Do you have a textbook? Anything useful in it? Cite it!
How about your school or local library? They've got to have something chemistry that you could flip through.
Try Science mag: http://www.sciencemag.org It's got news and articles and just a whole bunch of stuff where the focus is usually more on communicating the information than proving how smart you are (see my rant below), so you should be able to search through it and find helpful information that is easier to digest.
This place seems to offer free peer-reviewed articles:
Whole list: https://www.omicsonline.org/chemistry-journals.php
Chemical Sciences: https://www.omicsonline.org/chemical-sc ... ournal.php
As for legibility - yeah, that's to be expected. Papers are incredibly elitist. Unfortunately, they have become something to show how "intelligent" the author is rather than to share information. Honestly, I have a Masters and everyone I know in the program with me all thought papers were a drudge to sort through. They're written above my level, really, and they're written above yours. Here's some tricks to wading through the drudge and highly technical speak:
- Don't get dissuaded or down because you can't understand them! Take a deep breath and be patient with yourself.
- Focus on the abstract and conclusions! Most the other sections can be ignored all together.
- You might want to skim through the introduction to get a better idea of what the paper is about. Just do NOT draw any conclusions from the introduction. Usually in an introduction, we set up a hypothesis, and in science, when we set a hypothesis, we want to prove ourselves wrong, so our hypothesis should give you a false statement. That's why you might get confused between an introduction and a conclusion. Use the intro to discover the background information, but do not draw conclusions from it.
- If you're more of a pictures/graph person than a text person, focus mainly on the graphs and interpreting them and their conclusions.
- If you read the abstract and it isn't going to help you answer your question/isn't what you thought it was about, don't worry about trying to force your way through understanding the content. Close it and go to a new article.
- If you find a useful article, go to their intro/results, find where the useful conclusions came from, and then look at the sources they quote and see if you can't find an accessible version of that paper. It's likely you'll be able to share sources that way and find sources more quickly.
- Don't be afraid of the dictionary. I've straight up re-written sentences from articles to help myself understand them.
- Read stuff out loud! Often when you repeat it out loud, it will help you tease out what is actually being said.
- Finally, don't freak about this too much! I'm sure this is more of an exercise to get you looking for respectable sources and citing them in your own writing more than being able to interpret technical papers above your level!