WHERE TO START?

1. Find a subject.
- browse the journals (look at or more general science journals like Scientific American, or Discover or scan the more 'popular' Computer Science journals, like Dr. Dobbs, Communications of the ACM, or Computer Vision & Image Understanding)
- look at books on the new book shelf
- select something that you may have been introduced to in a previous class which piqued your interest
- when you find something of interest to you, talk to your thesis advisor to make sure it's an appropriate topic.

• BE SURE TO SELECT A TOPIC IN WHICH YOU HAVE A GENIUNE INTEREST! YOU MIGHT AS WELL ENJOY DOING IT!!

2. Get some background information...

• Go into TRIPOD, the Tri-College catalog and do a WORD SEARCH to see if there are any BOOKS on the subject. The QA 76 section is devoted to computer science, but you may find books of interest in other parts of the collection. Want to know more about the Library of Congress classification? The explanation on the about.com site maps it out very nicely.

• Using Encyclopedias and Handbooks in the Reference section, look for definitions and manageable overview articles. These are just a few of the Reference books in Cornell:

Access Science - the online version of McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology.

Ref QA76 .15 .E48 2003 Encyclopedia of Computer Science

Ref QA76 .15 .H43 2003 Encyclopedia of Computer Science & Technology

Ref QA76 .15 .H318 1999 The Dictionary of Computing & Digital Media

Ref QA76 .87 .H357 1997 Handbook of Evolutionary Computation

Ref QA76 .87 .H36 1997 Handbook of Neural Computation

• Check out xRefer Plus is a giant online reference library that provides you with access to a selection of 169 reference books. xreferplus includes encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and books of quotations, not to mention a range of subject-specific titles covering everything from art to accountancy and literature to law. Find out about the Science titles in xreferplus.

• Scirus, a web search engine devoted to Science & Technology.

• Google: Computer Science
• Open Directory Project: Computers
• dblp Computer Science Bibliography - links to on-line conference proceedings

• ProQuest Research Library - offers citations and full-text articles from thousands of academic and popular journals on all subjects, from 1971 through today. Always a good place to start!

• WEB OF SCIENCE - This is a good, interdisciplinary index with a unique feature which allows you to search for articles which CITE a particular article.

• CogNet - This is a growing collection of searchable electronic texts in the field of cognitive and brain sciences. The CogNet library contains work from both from the MIT Press, as well as links to resources from other publishers, professional associations, institutions, and individuals, offering public access to online work.

• INSPEC - Indexes scientific and technical journals and conference proceedings in physics, electrical engineering and electronics, COMPUTING & CONTROL, and information technology. January 1969 to the present. Updated weekly. There is a brief guide to using INSPEC, plus online help.

• MATHSCINET - This is the electronic version of Math Reviews, which is called MathSciNet, and goes all the way back to 1940! There is a very brief guide to using this database, plus lots of online help.

• Patent Full Text Database - Contains the full-text of over 3,000,000 patents from 1976 to the present, plus limited bibliographic data for over 4,000,000 patents from 1790 to 1975. It provides links to the Web Patent Full-Page Images Database (PatImg), which contains over 70,000,000 images, including every page of over 7,000,000 patents from 1790 to the most recent issue week.

• ACM's DIGITAL LIBRARY - online access to all of ACM's journals, SIG newletters and conference proceedings online!

• IEEE Xplore - online access to ALL of the IEEE journals, plus many conference proceedings. Coverage is back to 1998.

• CogPrints - a collection of e-prints in lots of computer science subjects including computational linguistics.

• ANNUAL REVIEWS - online access to ALL of the Annual Reviews we currently subscribe to. You can also find these IN PRINT - do a search on Tripod for a specific series title. OR you can do a Tripod search and select a specific title online. The Annual Review of Computer Science (QA75 .5 .A56) should find you some good review articles for your project.

• COMPUTER SCIENCE DATABASE - A bibliographic database covering literature in the field of Computer Science and Computer Technology with about 400 000 citations from 1972 to current.

• EEVL: E-journal Search Engine: Computing - Search the content of over 60 freely available full-text computing ejournals , selected for relevance and quality. Academic journals, professional and trade publications, and society journals are covered. All sites are also listed in the EEVL catalogue of Internet Resources .

• RESEARCH INDEX - A free, web-based database which offers access to a wide variety of technology-related subjects.

• CITESEER - CiteSeer is a scientific literature digital library. Topics covered include Artificial Intelligences, databases, machine learning, programming and much more.

• We do not have electronic access to ALL journals! There are still journals that don't exist electronically. Check Tripod for PRINT holdings.

• Look for the Connect to [journal title] from SWARTHMORE message in the middle of the journal record. If there is no Swarthmore message, that means we don't have access to it. If the journal is available at Bryn Mawr or Haverford Science Libraries, you will need to request the article via InterLibrary Loan

• Look for the MORE! button by citations when you run a search in most indexes. Click on the MORE! button next to the citation you want and a second window will open up.
From this window you can:

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InterLibrary Loan

While Cornell Library has a really good collection, obviously there will be times when we don't actually own something you've located in your research. That is when you'll need to borrow from other libraries and to do this you will need Inter-Library Loan (ILL).

Tri-College ILL - BOOKS: If you want a book from Bryn Mawr or Haverford, simply press the REQUEST button at the top of the Tripod screen. Enter your name & barcode, and select WHERE you want to pick up the book. Delivery takes approximately one day library to library.

Non-TriCollege ILL - BOOKS: For books NOT available in Tripod, try E-Z Borrow and request books directly from nearby Pennsylvania & NJ libraries.

JOURNAL ARTICLES: If you need an article from a journal not subscribed to by Swarthmore, fill out the journal article request form.

• Your Swat ID will get you into Penn's libraries, but you cannot borrow directly from them. You must use ILL to get anything from Penn.

• For online information on CITING electronic information, check out Online! , a reference guide to using internet sources. This site gives examples of different citation styles, including MLA, APA, Chicago & CBE.

Meg Spencer, Science Librarian

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/cornell/Sciences/compsci2.htm
Created 26 April 2000 mes Last updated 13 September 2005