CMNS 137 Technical Communication for Water Engineering Technology

The size of Scholarly publishing is enormous. In 2018, the Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publishing industry publishes more than 31,000 peer-reviewed English language journals (there are an additional 9,400 non-English language journals). Collectively publishing more than 3 million articles published per year. This area is growing at a 4% rate per year for articles and over 5% for journals annually. In 2017, the STM market was estimated to be worth $25.7 billion (USD).

Johnson, R., Watkinson, A.& Mabe, M. (2018) The STM report: An overview of scientific and scholarly publishing. https://www.stm-assoc.org/2018_10_04_STM_Report_2018.pdf

When you factor in the scholarly communications output from the Humanities and the Social Sciences this body of information grows even larger. Bring the non-scholarly content and the information available via the Internet. The amount of the available to you today is "mind-boggling."  

Take a few minutes to scope out your search strategy.

• Focus on identifying what type of information you require.
  • Whether you require peer-reviewed information, a mix of peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed information, or just non-peer-reviewed information.
• Identify keywords to use for searching.  You will find useful keywords in your textbooks, lectures, etc. 
• Run a few searches using your keywords and evaluate your search results.
• If you are not getting the types of results you seek, select new keywords and/or contact a librarian to assist.

• Start a Research Journal in which you record your search strategy and search results.
• Use the tools available in OCtopus to help manage your search results.
• 

Remember there is so much information out there you can search virtually forever.

• Define a time schedule for conducting your searches.
• Don't leave it until the night before your paper is due.
• Remember to leave lots of time for writing.