Research Guides: Mathematics Climate Research Network summer school and research program (July 31, 2023): Determining your search strategy

Information Timeline

The research guide at Seminole State College Library presents the information timeline in a clear fashion at https://libguides.seminolestate.edu/researchfoundations/informationtimeline.

Developing a search strategy

I always recommend starting your search using your library's discovery interface e.g. Primo, WorldCat, etc., as that will reveal what you will have immediate access to. Videos on how to use Primo are available on the ZSR Library YouTube channel.

ZSR has over 400 databases that you can utilize for research. Find a database that pertains to the topic or research question. During the session we discussed an alternative to Google Scholar is lens.org. You can search patents as well as scholarly works in lens.org and it allows you to filter resources in a variety of different was as well as look at the analytics of your search results. For researching pre-modern mathematicians, scientists, engineers, etc., you can use Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, Getty Research Institute, and other historical or social science databases. Be sure to find all of the alternate spellings of the individual's name!

I've identified different databases and tools that I used in the demo to illustrate different research strategies below:

Where to search to get background information, find resources from a singular source, etc.
Topic	Databases/Tools to Use in Order to . . .
Fire Spread Project - Students model the spread of forest fires to answer questions about when a wildfire becomes big, the rate of spread, and how to stop the fire. We use cellular automaton model that simulates the fire propagation as a contact-invasion process.	Develop background knowledge, find terminology, pinpoint resources Bing Chat scite.ai Assistant (Tool fee-based, browser extension free) Google Bard Perplexity.ai Science Direct Topic Index Google Books (preview mode) Credo Reference (Subscription, check Database A-Z Index) Google Ngram Viewer (See how terminology use changed over time) WorldCat (Library catalog of library catalogs around the world)
Paradox of Enrichment - Students investigate connections between climate change the paradox of enrichment. In a predator-prey system the paradox occurs when increasing the food available to the prey destabilizes the predator population.	Primo Inciteful.xyz (Use one paper to find other papers, authors, etc.)
Tipping Events - Study tipping phenomena through data assimilation. Can we detect any movement towards tipping of the ocean overturning circulation in the North Atlantic?	Used Google Ngram Viewer to see if tipping phenomena or tipping event was used most often in the literature With tipping phenomena used most consistently overtime, modified the search to add "North Atlantic"
Controlled Tipping - In this project, the goal is for students to answer the question of how to best use rate induced tipping to control noise induced tipping events in a conceptual climate model.	Use elicit.org and pose your research question Export the results as a BIB file In Research Rabbit, create a new collection, name it appropriately, and import the BIB file
Tipping Time - This project will seek to better understand one aspect of the transition to a sea ice-free Arctic, namely the transition time from the current state, with ice year-round, to a state where the Arctic is ice-free year-round.	scite.ai Assistant (Tool fee-based, browser extension free) Science research assistant browser extension The specific selections used with the browser extension are in the image below.