Overview of Services at the Swain Library

Document Delivery | Request It Online | Alerting Services | Printing, Photocopying & Scanning | Reference & Instruction | Course Reserves | Course Pages

Course Pages

Chemistry 24N: Freshman Seminar on Nutrition and History

Selected Library Resources

Catalog | Encyclopedias | Handbooks | Indexes | Abbreviations | Style Manuals | Websites | Internet

Before starting to do research for a paper, it is helpful to understand the structure and organization of scientific information. Please see:

• Flow of Scientific Information (Univ. Waterloo Library)

Library Catalog

• Socrates: Stanford’s Online Catalog

  Socrates contains books and titles of journals owned by the Stanford Libraries. To find journal articles, you need to search Indexes and Abstracts.

  When searching Socrates, it is helpful to put your “ideal” keywords into the title field. Then, view the long record for titles that look relevant. Included in the description are subject headings. Clicking on subject headings will help you find more items on the same topic that may have not used the keyword you searched.

  For example, below are the titles and subjects that were used for some of the books placed on reserve for this class:

  Title	Subject (LC)
  Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies	Social evolution. Civilization--History. Ethnology. Human beings--Effect of environment on. Culture diffusion.
  The Vitamin hunters	Nutrition. Nutrition--Research.
  Seed to civilization: the story of food	Agriculture--History. Food--History. Food crops--History. Ethnobotany. Ethnozoology.
  Seeds of change: five plants that transformed mankind	Plants and civilization.
  On food and cooking: the science and lore of the kitchen	Cookery. Food.
  Plagues and peoples	Epidemics--History. Civilization--History.
  The great hunger: Ireland 1845-1849.	Famines--Ireland. Ireland--Emigration and immigration.
  Rats, lice and history / being a study in biography, which after twelve preliminary chapters indispensable for the preparation of the lay reader, deals with the life history of typhus fever.	Typhus fever. Epidemics--History. Lice. Rats as carriers of disease.
  The potato: how the humble spud rescued the western world	Potatoes--History. Potatoes--Social aspects. Plants and history.

• Most books are available only in printed form, however there is a growing number of books available on the internet. Some online nutrition books can be found at these websites:
  • National Academy Press
  • The Online Books Paage
  • Knovel

Encyclopedias

• Access Science: McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
• Encyclopedia Britannica (Stanford users only)
• The Cambridge world history of human disease
  Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  Location: Green Library - Information Center R131 .C233 1993
• Companion encyclopedia of the history of medicine
  London; New York: Routledge, 1993.
  Location: Green Library - Humanities and Area Studies Res. Cntr. R133 .E5 1993 v.1-2
• Encyclopedia of Life Sciences
• Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology
• Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry

Handbooks

• The Merck Manual — Home Edition
• The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy

Indexes to the Journal Literature

• Databases Available at Stanford University — Alphabetical List
• Agricola
• BIOSIS via ISI Web of Knowledge
• Chemical Abstracts Online via SciFinder Scholar (must download search software)
• Environmental Studies Databases
• Historical Abstracts
• History of Science and Technology
• PubMed

Journal Abbreviations

• All That JAS: Journal Abbreviation Sources

Style Manuals

• The ACS Style Guide: A Manual for Authors and Editors, 2nd Edition.
  Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, c1997.
  Location: Swain Permanent Reserves QD8.5 .A25 1997

Selected Web Sites

• Food and Nutrition (e-Reference Collection, Cornell Univ.)
• Food/Nutrition Resources (UC Berkeley Public Health Library)
• Health Topics (World Health Organization)
• Medline Plus Health Information (National Library of Medicine)
• Nutrition Resources (Univ. Wisconsin)

Searching the Internet

• Search Engines Workshop

  Focuses on using Google, AllTheWeb, and Alta Vista. Also includes criteria on how to evaluate a web site. The web comprises a wide range of materials that may contain authoritative, biased, or incorrect information.

  Quick tip for using Google: add “site:.edu” or “site:.org” to limit a search to educational or organization sites. Many times organizations dedicated to a particular topic will have links to other resources.