Science Search Engines and Resouces

• N.B. Encyclopdia Britannica Online is no longer avaiable at OSU. The default alternative, Wikipedia, warns the reader when a current article has serious flaws: missing references, important topics. In other words, you must be able to judge the quality of what you find.
• Yahoo Science
     Astronomy   Chemisty   Nanotechnology
     Physics    condensed matter, quantum computing, magnetism, superconductivty, etc.
• Nature (often livelier prose than Science)   Nature Physics   Nature Materials plus 100+ more niche journals.
• Science Magazine
• Los Alamos Science
• LLNL Science & Technology
• Union of Concern Scientists Entry page spotlights current developments (e.g., nuclear reactors after earth quakes and such) with links to archived information on their primary concerns:
  scientific integrity,global warming, clean vehicles , clean energy,
  nuclear power, nuclear weapons and global security,
  food and abriculture.
• APS 2008 Report on Energy Future, see page 4 for table of contents, page 8 executive summary.,
• CIA World Factbook: search engine

	Syntax: " ", natural language.

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In published papers, one should use only primary sources. These include orginal refereed papers and refereed review articles and books. In the case of books, reputable publishers have the book read by one of more experts in addition to using fact checker for references and numbers in tables. Some publishers fall far short of this standard.

Getting to brass tacks: can you cite Wikipedia? This is controversial topic. The Middlebury College history department says no. At the same time, it encourage Wikipedia's use to find references that have been refereed.

For this course, I would like you to strive to that standard here but recognize that with your experience this may be difficult for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is that original references are often written in such technical language that you can't easily understand them. If you use Wikipedia as your source, remember that anyone can revise any article. Both accidental and deliberate "errors" can appear. Wikipedia has many volunteers seeking to remove these but you may read a flawed article. That is one of the reason the style for citing URL includes the "date accessed."