This guide has been prepared to assist GEOL 543 and GEOE 446 students with their research. Please contact engsci@queensu.ca to schedule a phone/Teams consultation.
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This guide contains links to a number of different resources and search tools. Finding Books has links to relevant ebook collections, as well as the library's major search interface, Omni.
Finding Articles and Reports has links to the library's major engineering and geosciences databases, Compendex and Georef. These are good sources for finding citations for scholarly articles, theses, reports, conference proceedings and maps.
Research completed by graduate students in the past two years may not yet be published as scholarly articles. To find this recent research, try searching the Proquest thesis database linked in Finding Theses and Dissertations.
Many of the capstone topics are location- or project-specific. Often, this kind of information is found in government sources, such as reports written for municipalities. The custom government Google search on Government Information is very useful for finding this kind of gray literature. Other valuable sites include the federal Geoscan database, or the provincial geological survey publications databases. Search Tips - Location Searching in Canada offers some advice on using NTS grid numbers to search these specialized resources.
Geospatial data repositories, both open and licensed, are listed in Finding Maps. Federal and provincial ministries, and municipalities, offer open data portals for a variety of topics.
What if you find a relevant article, report or book chapter, and it's not at Queen's? The library's free Interlibrary loan service is accepting requests for electronic articles or print books.
It's important to consider Research Data Management and Citation Management early in a project.
Citation managers act as personal libraries. As you search for relevant information, you can add the citations to your manager while you search. Citation managers such as Zotero have a plug-in feature that works with MS Word that allows you to add citations and a bibliography to your document as you write, and to format them easily.
Data management is a major part of a research project. Issues to consider include:
Data collection |
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Documentation and Metadata |
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Storage and Back-up |
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Preservation |
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Sharing and Re-use |
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Responsibilities and Resources |
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Ethics and Legal Compliance |
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(Table from the DMP Assistant template.)
A Data Management Plan (DMP) template is available from the Canadian Portage Network. Sign up for a free account to the DMP Assistant to access this template. The template is designed to format all the RMD issues already listed. Each section has links to examples and detailed background information. For example, the section on file naming has links to specific "how to" resources. The template allows for teams to work on a single document, then to share and or export it.