Before your lab session the week of February 19, please do the following:
SciFinderⁿ is available via the web, but you must create an individual account before using SciFinderⁿ. There are instructions for doing this in your class Moodle page. Contact a reference librarian (ask@gettysburg.edu or 717-337-6600) if you have any questions about setting up your personal account. Be sure to use your GC username/password, wait for your activation email to arrive, and then use the main login page to access SciFinderⁿ.
When you use the structure drawing editor, you may need to update your Java applet cache or use the non-java editor. Just follow the instructions and let the computer update java if necessary.
Scopus is an interdisciplinary article database. It covers science, social science, and humanities, but its strength is in science. Search mainly by title, author, and abstract (there are no controlled subject fields here).
Articles published 1996-present are enhanced with cited references; you can see who cited whom and follow the citation trail forward or backward in time. The number of times a work has been cited is a measure of its quality and influence.
For fun, search by "author" for people you know!
Google Scholar searches for scholarly articles on the web. When you are searching Google Scholar look for Gett It @ Gettysburg to check the library's holdings for the journal article. You can also configure Google Scholar to always recognize Gettysburg College as your institution in the "Settings."
This short tutorial walks you through what you need to do to connect Google Scholar to your library account.