Gathering of scientific information
Read the text paying attention to the tools recommended for collecting scientific information. Use the word list below for memorizing the appropriate vocabulary. Be ready to discuss the world’s most trusted information servicescovering the leading scholarly literature.
Thanks to the Internet and Web Search much information is within easy reach, and researchers can gather firsthand information not only from papers and books. The number of information services on the web is overwhelming, and their covering of sources is an excellent information collection tool. Such web service as Google is the first choice for saving time in the preparation of projects, papers and thesis. It is the best tool for quick web searching due to its clean and user-friendly interface.
Google provides researchers with immediate access to the papers it finds. It allows you to find all papers that contain certain words and gives a good ordering and presentation of results. Dogpile is a meta-search engine with a slogan “All the best search engines piled into one” as it covers a larger number of pages combining the results from several existing search engines including Yahoo, Google and MSN. Dogpile is very useful for looking something very specific information, which is hard to find as it has links to a number of more specialized databases.
To expand the access, awareness and appreciation of scientific sources researches use global citation navigation provided by Web of Science. In the scientific world, Web of Science is the most authoritative database, especially for its citation count for papers and authors. It does not give direct access to the papers and ignores the content, but can only search article titles and keywords to deliver the most relevant and complete search results. For further refining the obtained results, researches can use embedded analysis tools, which help, understand the worldwide impact of the sources and authors, and make new discoveries across disciplines and regions. Ensuring the most trusted citation index Web of Science searches and discovers the world’s most impactful scholarly journals and scientific research.
Elsevier Science Publishing Company is a world-leading provider of information. It enhances the performance of science and technology professionals. Scirus, set up by Elsevier publishers, is more comprehensive and user-friendly than Web of Science, and claims to be the most comprehensive scientific search engine.
Many libraries within the University network have established agreements for "interlibrary lending". This means that if the book is not available at one of the libraries, you can order it via the database and collect it at your University library after a short waiting period provided you pay a small fee.
The largest booksellers, such as Amazon due to very extensive catalogues also allow search of book content. Some databases include open-access scientific journals and allow their rapid identification to browse relevant articles from or to publish your research in.
When it is necessary to search various websites for relevant information or to refer, Zotero is an extremely useful "plug-in" for the free web browser Firefox. It can extract bibliographical data from the important publication sites, such as Google Scholar, Web of Science and Amazon. OneLook can search general and specialized dictionaries for rare technical terms or the subtleties of the different meanings that do not appear in common dictionaries. Google Translate is the best of translation engines that provides translation of webpages. Anyway, if you want to use them, you will still have quite some work to manually "clean up" the translations.
The Russian Science Citation Index on Web of Science in collaboration with the Scientific Electronic Library (eLibrary.RU) covers many fields including engineering and material science. It enables discovery of new insights from Russian publications searching, tracking and measuring Russian research.
Table 6 Word List
| № | Words and word combinations | Translation |
| 1. | authoritative database | заслуживающая доверия база данных |
| 2. | be within easy reach | быть легко доступным |
| 3. | free web browser | бесплатный веб-браузер |
| 4. | extract bibliographical data | получать библиографию |
| 5. | gather firsthand information | получать информацию из первых рук |
| 6. | immediate access | немедленный доступ |
| 7. | interlibrary lending | межбиблиотечный абонемент |
| 8. | make a list of references | составлять библиографию |
| 9. | open-access scientific journals | научные журналы открытого доступа |
| 10. | plug-in | «подключатель» |
| 11. | refine the obtained results | обработка полученных данных |
| 12. | tracking | отслеживание данных |
| 13. | the most comprehensive scientific search engine. | самая полная поисковая система |
| 14. | the most trusted citation index | самый надёжный индекс цитирования |
| 15. | user-friendly interface | удобный интерфейс |
| 16. | the most impactful scholarly journals | самые цитируемые научные журналы |
| 17. | subtleties | тонкие смысловые различия |
| 18. | web search | поиск в интернете |
Exercise 2.4.1