MU - Chemistry 212
Online Publications & Newspapers
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The way scientists communicate has been altered in a revolutionary fashion
by the mid-1990s. Research used to be published in printed journals and
finding relevant research articles was a
difficult, nontrivial and time-consuming process. Heavy volumes contained
summaries of articles and one located these abstract via keywords. Such
"abstracts" existed for every discipline and the "chemical abstracts"
eventually were put online (mid-1980s). But even then, one still needed to
search the abstracts for keywords, then look through the abstract and then
run to the library and get the actual article. All this has changed very
much. Nowadays, all articles of all journals are available online! Full
text searches are now the norm.
Universities usually obtain site-licenses with the various publishers so
that all the students of that university can access all the journals by
these publishers freely. This access is "free" so long as you access the
journal from a computer that is located on campus with an IP address that
identifies the computer as part of the MU system. For example, you can
access the
Journal of
Organic Chemistry
from campus because MU has a license agreement with the
American Chemical Society,
the publisher of JOC.
Give it a try! Click "search the journals" and try out a search. For
example, type "Glaser" in the author search line and click the submit
button. In a split second, a list comes up of Dr. Glaser's papers and you
have full access to these articles. Look around. Take a look at
the recent publications of your other professors.
Other journals might require that you type in a username and a password.
The
Journal of
Chemical Education is one of these journals. MU acquired a site
license and MU students can read JCE Online as user "univ of
missouri-columbia" with password "13410". Now, I want you to read one
article in the September 2000 issue of JCE
entitled "On the Love of Teaching and the Challenge of
Online Learning: A Few Reflections" by Richard N. Zare.
As always: Enjoy! RG.