FYSE 1360 From Synapse to Self Research Guide

This guide is designed for Professor Mark Stefani's FYSE 1360, From Synapse to Self.  The purpose of the guide is to help students develop their ability to locate, evaluate, and use information in a variety of formats, laying the foundation for becoming independent life-long learners. 

• Summon
• PubMed
• Scopus

• Summon: Find articles, books, videos and more in our collections.
• MIDCAT: Find books and journal titles in our collections
• NExpress: NExpress Consortium (books from 7 libraries including Middlebury)
  

• WorldCat: world's largest library catalog [go/worldcat]
  

Journals/Magazines

Academic OneFile
1980 - current. Interdisciplinary index covering over 10,000 scholarly and popular journals and magazines. Most references include full-text or links to full-text. Contains all of Expanded Academic Index ASAP. Coverage of scientific journals is limited.  Shortcuts:  go/onefile (on campus),  http://go.middlebury.edu/onefile (off-campus).

PsycINFO (ProQuest)
Now on the ProQuest platform.  Index and abstracts for psychology journals from 1806-current, and books, 1967-current.  Note:  The "Target Audience" limit will find only books and encyclopedias.
 

PubMed
1950s-current. A major source for scholarly biomedical literature. 

• Access PubMed from a library page or via the 'go' link [go/pubmed (on campus) or http://go.middlebury.edu/pubmed (off-campus)].  This will prompt PubMed to link its results to Middlebury collections and our interlibrary loan form.
• To search for a phrase, enter it without quotation marks so that PubMed's  Automatic Term Mapping (ATM) feature will be activated. 
• PubMed automatically places the AND operator between your search terms. When you want to be sure the correct Boolean operator (AND, OR, NOT) is used, enter it in uppercase.
• Truncation turns off ATM and the automatic addition of MeSH terms. For example, heart attack* will not prompt a search for the MeSH term Myocardial Infarction. 

Scopus
Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with tools to track, analyze and visualize research. Its content falls most heavily in the physical and life sciences, but it also covers social sciences and humanities literature.

• Contains more than 47 million records, 70% with abstracts, more than 19,500 titles from 5,000 publishers worldwide.  70% of content is pulled from international sources.  Includes MEDLINE.
• Records since 1996 include searchable cited references.
• Shortcut: go/scopus (on campus) or http://go.middlebury.edu/scopus (off-campus)

Summon
Summon is our newest and most effective tool for searching many resources at once, so we’ve put it right at the center of the library home page (look for the “Summon” tab in the “Library Quick Search” box). Summon searches most library resources including MIDCAT, full-text newspapers and journals, and most of our library databases. Read more about it in the LIS blog. Watch a video tutorial.

• Evaluating Resources
• Five Criteria for Evaluating Web Pages

• RefWorks login page
• RefWorks help documents