ITP 210 - Technical Writing

Introduction | Reference Sources | Indexes & Databases | Internet Resources | Writing the Paper

Tim Lynch phone: 207 780-5156; Email: tlynch@usm.maine.edu

The following guide was designed for the Technical Writing class Taught by Virginia Cross Wilder. For further research assistance, please contact Tim Lynch tlynch@usm.maine.edu; (780-5156)

Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia
GOR and POR Reference Q 121 .V3 1988

McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
GOR and POR Reference Q 121 .M3 2002

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms
GOR and POR Reference Q 123 .M15 2003

See the Reference Librarian for more sources!

Basic Search Strategy:

Searching Using AND and OR:

1. State your topic in one sentence. (Ex. I'm looking for information about water pollution in Canada)
2. Separate important terms. (Ex. water AND pollution AND Canada)
3. Did you find enough information? If not continue. . . .
4. Add IMPORTANT synonyms and related terms that you would find in the professional literature. (water AND (pollution OR water pollution ) AND Canada)
5. Truncate terms to get plural as well as singular form.
   Ex. water* AND (pollut* OR water pollut*) and Canad*

Ven Diagram Representing Search Results:

OR [e.g., Water OR Air] AND [e.g., Water AND Air] NOT [e.g., Water NOT Air]

Catalogs

URSUS
The catalog for the University of Southern Maine as well as the entire University of Maine system.

World Cat
Bibliographic records for more than 36 million items held at OCLC member libraries throughout the world. Includes all types of information resources. Updated daily.

Multi-Disciplinary Databases

Academic Search Premier
Provides full text for nearly 4,000 scholarly publications of which 3,100 are peer reviewed. Academic areas of study include: social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies.

IngentaConnect
Index to the tables of contents of 17,000 English language periodicals. Covers all disciplines. Updated daily. NOTE: Full text access available ONLY with subscriptions to individual titles. Check your library for holdings.

Military and Government Collection
Search over 600 military titles, government periodicals, trade publications and newsweeklies for topics concerning all branches of the military. Full text is available for more than a third of the periodicals indexed. Over 240 pamphlets are also included.

ProQuest Newspapers
Full-text since 1997 (Some earlier) of over 500 U.S. and International news sources, including news wires, big city and regional newspapers from the Wall Street Journal, NY Times and Boston Globe to Portland and Bangor dailies. Search by subject or browse an issue.

Science Citation Index, Expanded
Comprehensive multidisciplinary coverage of approximately 5,800 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals. Provides cited reference searching, with which users can navigate forward, backward, and through the literature, searching multi-disciplines to uncover information relative to their research.

Specialized Databases

National Technical Information Service Technical Reports
This is a subset of the NTIS database. This Technical Reports database indexes government reports from 1990 to present. Over 350,000 publications are included. Searching is by keyword, which includes authors' names. No abstracts are presented. Bibliographic information provided includes title, author, author affiliation, total pages, date, and document type.

Neutral (more or less)

Thomas (LOC)
New York Times
Washington Post
Chicago Tribune
Brookings Institute

Liberal

The Nation Magazine
Boston Globe (more or less)
Air America Radio
Democracy Now!
New Republic Magazine

Conservative

Town Hall.com
Wall Street Journal (more or less)
National Review
Cato Institute

A Writer’s Reference
GOR and POR and LEW Reference PE1408 .H2778 2007
available electronically

Online! A Reference Guide Using Internet Resources


Plagerism

Plagiarism-The Do's and Dont's: Guidelines for Avoiding Plagiarism (University of California-Davis)

Plagiarism: What it is and How to Recognize and Avoid it (Indiana University)

Created by: Tim Lynch
Created on: 01.22.2006
Last Updated: 08.21.2007