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INTEGSCI 260: Entering Research (Summer 2025)

Welcome

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Welcome to UW-Madison from your Science & Engineering Librarians! We are excited to be your partners throughout your academic journey as scientists on campus. The Libraries' website is your portal to accessing all the information you need to be a successful researcher.

If you have questions, just send us a message! We will get back in touch within 24 hours Monday-Friday. For even quicker answers, you can use our website to chat with a librarian.

Scientific Papers

This summer, you'll be looking for scientific papers (scholarly research articles) that were written by the same people who did the experiment and are peer reviewed. Other scientists serve as reviewers to read the paper and give feedback on its content, writing, and methods. The paper's authors will edit the paper based on that feedback. Peer review helps advance science and improves the sharing of scientific work.

Peer reviewed articles are how scientists share the results of their experiments with other scientists.

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Where do I search?

The best way to find scholarly sources is by using library databases. A library database might look different than other databases you've heard of before, but it works the same way. Like any database, they're searchable electronic collections of data and information. In the case of library databases, the data is about scientific papers and other types of sources.

The Libraries pay to subscribe to over 1000 databases, each with different focuses. These are good starting points:

 

How to search in a database

Databases need to be searched in a particular way for them to understand what we're looking for. We can't search a database like Google (or at least, not yet). This means that we have to use keywords, or specific words and phrases, instead of complete sentences.

Creating a Search

Step one: Look at your hypothesis or research question and identify the variables. List any variables and who/what/where words. Are there any other words a scientist might use to talk about this topic?

Tip: avoid general words like "effect", "impact", "using"

Example question: Do bumblebees have a favorite color when choosing flowers to pollinate?

Example keywords: bumblebee, Bombus pensylvanicus, pollination, color preference

Step two: Combine your keywords using words like AND, OR, and NOT

OR - If you have multiple keywords that mean similar things, combine them using OR.

  • bumblebee OR Bombus pensylvanicus

AND - Combine different keywords to make your search more specific

  • bumblebee AND color AND pollination

NOT - Exclude a term from your results

  • NOT honeybee

"Quotes" - If a key term is more than one word, put it in "quotes" to make the database search for both words next to each other and in that order.

  • "color preference"

Grouping Keywords

Like with the order of operations in math, databases start by looking at parenthesis. Most of the time, you will want to put parenthesis around keywords you're combining with OR.

  • (bumblebee OR Bombus pensylvanicus) AND color

Tip: in Web of Science and many other databases, adding lines to your search works the same as parenthesis. In PubMed, you have to use parenthesis.

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Finding review articles

Sometimes scientists write peer reviewed papers summarizing multiple studies done by other scientists. These papers are usually called “review articles” because they are “reviewing” (looking at) the overall results of scientific research on a topic. Review articles are helpful for learning a lot about a new topic, because they summarize the current state of science in an area. In databases, you can filter your search results to show just review articles.

Finding articles by your professor

Scientists usually do a lot of research on a certain topic. Your professor may have already published a paper. Search for papers by your professor by changing the dropdown menu next to the search bar to "Author", then type their last name, first name.

Tip: Read that paper for context, and also take a look at the papers that your professor is citing. Ask your professor questions about these papers-- scientists love talking about science.

Finding the whole article

Find It at UW button 

In many databases, you need to click a link before you can read the entire article. Click the red "Find It" button or the "Find It at UW Madison" link to:

  • access online full text (when available)
  • request a free pdf of the article or book chapter to be emailed to you if it's not available to read online

Peer Review/ Scholarly Sources

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Some databases make it easy to tell if a paper is a scholarly research article. They might let you filter your search results to scholarly research articles by selecting filters like "Limit to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals". But, not every database is this helpful. Sometimes we have to do a little extra work to figure out if a paper has been peer reviewed or not.

All peer reviewed scientific papers are published by journals. A journal finds peer reviewers for scientific papers and posts the finished papers on their website. If an article has been peer reviewed, it will say so on that website. Look for a page on their website with a name like "author guidelines", "submission instructions", "instructions for authors", or "publish with us". Search this page for a mention of "peer review".

If you're not sure, ask a librarian for help!

As you get more familiar with scientific papers, you'll start to notice some ways that scholarly research articles are similar. This is how some people can quickly tell if it's likely that a paper is peer reviewed or not.