Chapter 71

Summarise the main differences between a review and a scientific paper. From the many subject areas in the Chemical Society Reviews series (find via your library's periodical indexing system), pick one that matches your subject interests, and within this find a review that seems relevant or interesting. Read the review and write down five ways in which the writing style and content differ from those seen in primary scientific papers.

Gather a collection of primary sources for a topic. From the journal section of the library, select an interesting scientific paper published about 5-10 years ago. First, work back from the references cited by that paper: can you identify from the text or the article titles which are the most important and relevant to the topic? List five of these, using the proper conventions for citing articles in a reference list (see Chapter 9). Note that each of these papers will also cite other articles, always going back in time. Now using the Science Citation Index or a similar system (e.g. the Web of Science website at http://wos.mimas.ac.uk or Google Scholar at http://scholar.google.com/), work forward and find out who has cited your selected article in the time since its publication. Again, list the five most important articles found.