| Ideas for choosing a topic |
- Discuss your topic ideas
with your course Professor.
- Schedule a research consultation
with a Reference
Librarian at the Science Library.
- There are subject encyclopedias,
dictionaries, and handbooks for most
topics or subject areas. See Find
background information.
- Sometimes it is helpful
to state your topic idea as a question.
- Example: "Does smell
play a part in the evolution of mate selection in
humans?"
- Identify the main concepts or keywords: "smell", "evolution",
and "mate selection"
- Diagram your sentence and underline the keywords,
to help you
visualize
your topic.
- Make a list of synonyms underneath each keyword. For example:
| Smell |
Evolution |
Mate
Selection |
| Olfaction |
Adaptation
(Biology) |
Mating |
| Pheromones |
Behavior
Evolution |
Mating
behavior |
| Sex Attractants
- MESH term |
Behavior
Genetics |
Sexual
Selection |
| Odor |
Natural
Selection |
Courtship |
| Odour
(British spelling) |
Human
Genetics |
Sexual
behavior in animals |
Wellesley
College Library catalog
In addition to books, you
will also find journals, videos, and more.
Interlibrary
Loan (ILL)
Wellesley College faculty, students, and staff may use Interlibrary Loan and
or other Document Delivery services to
borrow or obtain copies of materials not found in Wellesley's collection.
Other
nearby library catalogs
Links to other nearby libraries.
WorldCat
OCLC catalog of books and other materials in libraries worldwide.
CogNet
Books - Over
400 full-text books in cognitive science from The MIT Press are included. on-campus
access / off-campus
access (search function may not work with off-campus access)
National
Academies Press
At the National Academy Press web site, you can search over 3,000
full-text books online for specific subject terms, in order to locate
relevant chapters or book titles. Coverage includes subjects like
physical sciences, materials science/engineering, environmental issues,
and more.
Floor
Map of Science Library
| Find background information |
Encyclopedias and handbooks are great resources for research ideas, to get a quick overview of the research that has been done on a topic (and the names of the key researchers), and to find out a definition of an unfamiliar term or field of research.
Scanning current issues of journals is another way to get ideas for your project. Some key titles in cognitive science are: Cognition,
Applied Cognitive Psychology, Brain & Cognition, Cognitive Psychology,
Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Psycholinguistic
Research, Journal of Mental Imagery, Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory and Cognition, Neuropsychologia, Trends in Cognitive
Science, and Behavioral Neuroscience.
AccessScience
Access to all the articles, fully illustrated, from the latest edition of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, Research Updates from the McGraw-Hill Yearbooks, thousands of illustrations, and the latest Science News® headlines, biographies, 110,000+ definitions from The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, and more.
CogNet Reference is a collection of 7 full-text online reference books. Reference books included: The Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, The Cognitive Neurosciences III , The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks 2e, The Handbook of Multisensory Processes, The Visual Neurosciences, and The MIT Encyclopedia of Communication Disorders. on-campus access /
off-campus access (Search function may not work with off-campus access.)
Cognitive
Science Dictionary provided by the University of Alberta.
Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind is a peer-reviewed dictionary intended to reflect current approaches to the philosophy of mind.
Oxford Reference Online
Oxford Reference Online contains over 100 dictionary, language
reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University
Press.
The following databases
provide either full-text articles or citations (information about
when and where the article was published).
Once you have a citation for an article, use the Find
It! @ Wellesley link
from each citation to search one or more electronic journal sources through
the Wellesley College Library Catalog.
Use the name of the journal as the title. If Wellesley does not own the article,
you can request it via Interlibrary Loan
(ILL).
Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is the world's most valuable and comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 6,100 full-text periodicals, including more than 5,100 peer-reviewed journals.
Behavioral
and Brain Sciences Print Archives
BBS print archives
provide full text of articles that can be accessed through subject
browsing
or searched
by keywords
or author.
CogPrints
Electronic Archive
CogPrints Electronic Archive provides access to scholarly papers
in many areas of psychology.
ERIC
The Educational Resources Information Center contains annotated references
to educational materials issued in the monthly Resources in Education (RIE)
and to journal articles issued in the monthly Current Index to Journals
in Education (CIJE). Contains bibliographic references from the U.S. Department
of Education, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, and the
National Library of Education.
JSTOR
The JSTOR collection contains full-text articles from several periodicals.
This is an archive, and the most recent few years are usually not available
on JSTOR.
MEDLINE (via ISI's Web of Science)
MEDLINE is the premier database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). It contains over 12 million records of journal articles in all areas of the life sciences, with particular emphasis on biomedicine.The articles indexed in MEDLINE were published in more than 4,600 international journals, published in over 30 languages.
MLA
Bibliography 1963-
Use this to find articles about language, literature, film, and drama
in all languages.
Project
Muse
Academic journals in humanities & social sciences. Current
5 years available
PsycINFO (via
EBSCO host)
PsycINFO , from the American Psychological Association (APA), contains nearly 2.3 million citations and summaries of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, all in psychology and related disciplines, dating as far back as the 1800s. Journal coverage, which spans 1887 to present, includes international material selected from more than 2,100 periodicals in more than 25 languages.
Science
Direct
Full-text articles from several social science periodicals. Access to articles
with green icons only. 1995+
Web of
Science
Web of Science at Wellesley consists of the Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Humanities Citation Index. Web of Science is very useful in performing interdisciplinary subject
searches and
citation searches.
Other databases may be useful
for you, depending on your specific topic and approach. The Databases A-Z page lists all of the electronic resources and what subjects
and time span they cover.
| APA format for research papers |
NOTE! If you cite a journal article from a database,
you must acknowledge that you read the article in electronic form (as
opposed to reading the actual article in print). Here is an example:
Cooper, M., Krull, J., Agocha, V., Flanagan, M., Orcutt, H., Grabe, S., et al. (2008, August). Motivational pathways to alcohol use and abuse among Black and White
adolescents. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 117(3), 485-501. Retrieved September 30, 2008, doi:10.1037/a0012592
- Use the "cited references" tab for citation searching
in PsycINFO.
- Use the Science Citation Index Expanded (1900-present) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (1956-present) in Web
of Science.
General Sites
American Association for Artificial Intelligence's Cognitive Science page
is a great place to start for introductory material, readings and links related to AI & Cog Sci.
Celebrities in Cognitive Science links you to the leading researchers in the field.
CogPrints Electronic Archive provides access to scholarly papers in many areas of cognitive science.
Wellesley's Internet Resources for Psychology.
Artificial Intelligence
MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
AI
on the Web from UC Berkeley.
American Association for Artificial Intelligence
Consciousness
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
The Humanoid Robotics Group at MIT builds, maintains, and experiments
with Cog, a humanoid robot.
Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: An Annotated Bibliography, from David Chalmers
and his Web resources related to consciousness
The
Koch Lab - Christof Koch at CalTech is interested in the biophysics of neuronal computation.
Evolutionary psychology
The Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara
Human Behavior and Evolution Society
Psycholinguistics
Cornell Language Acquisition Lab--Papers on Language Acquisition
The Mind Articulation Project an international collaboration focused on language and thought research.
WordNet is an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory.
Psycholinguistics
Index from About.com, a listing of psycholinguistics sources on
the Web.
Linguistic Society of America
|