Advanced Literature Searching

Searching the literature is an essential part of doing research. Nearly all the astronomical literature is online at ADS (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/). From anywhere, you can search via the ADS form, read abstracts, and old papers. For the most part you will only be able to read recent papers when you're connecting from a university internet domain such as caltech.edu (though your local public library might also have access).

Questions to think about and things to try with literature searching

Come up with your own answers and then you can discuss literature searching with others on this wiki.

• Find a recent paper that uses IRAC and/or MIPS data to study a star forming region in our Galaxy.
  • What region are they studying? What did they learn?
• Find a recent paper by Luisa or Varoujan or any other mentor astronomer you know. What is it about?
  • Can you find one where more than one of your mentor astronomer friends are both co-authors of the same paper? No guarantees that you will -- we span a broad range of interests! If you find one, what is it about?
• Bonus question: Find a paper on any subject of interest to you published in a journal, this month. What is it about?
• Bonus question: Find a paper on any subject of interest to you posted to the web, this week. What is it about? (Hint: the very most recent things aren't in the journals yet. ADS will let you search "arXiv e-prints", which links to this archive.)

Go to Basic Literature Searching.