This blog is for students and staff in Biological Sciences and Earth & Planetary Sciences at Birkbeck and students studying science subjects at Birkbeck Stratford. Keep up to date with Library news, information about new resources and web sites, tips for making the most of existing resources, as well snippets on science from around the web.
Tim Requarth suggests that Scientists need to take a different approach to communicating the findings of their research in order for the public to understand and engage with it in a meaningful way. If you're studying a science then it might be an interesting read for you, encouraging you to consider how you communicate the key findings of your research and how you might do that more effectively, depending on your purpose and desired outcome. Do you want simply to inform? Entertain? Inspire? Change minds? All of those things? Requarth, T. (2017) Scientists, Stop Thinking Explaining Science Will Fix Things.Slate.Accessed: 27/04/2017.
As the events of Science week come to an end, I'll leave you with one final study tip and that is to read. Read and read well. Critical reading is an essential part of your study. You need to read the books, articles, blogs recommended by your lecturers to get a good understanding of your subject and to be able to engage in discussion as well as complete your assignments. If you have the time, go beyond the recommended reading to explore more. Your lecturers will always have more reading that they can suggest on a given topic. The amount of reading required for your course may feel overwhelming at times, so make the most of the resources available to help you manage your reading and do it more efficiently, such as the Birkbeck Learning Skills module and the Study Skills Resources in Birkbeck Library. The Open University also have a section about Critical Reading Techniques that you may find useful. Reading for your course will help you progress in your studies. Reading more widely will help you in pretty much any other aspect of your life. The Counselling Service at Birkbeck has put together a list of recommended reading addressing many different aspects of life in their Bibliotherapy section.
The Times Higher Education asked students for their reading recommendations, so take a look and see if there's anything there that will broaden your world and inspire. Remember that through the Library you have access to books, articles, programmes on such a wide variety of subjects. If you're interested in reading beyond your subject area, then the Library subject guides are a good place to start to learn about where to find information on different subject areas. Happy Reading!
Science week study tip 4 is just one way that you can make those databases work for you by creating search alerts. You're busy people with full lives, so anything that can save you a bit of time must be a good thing. Search alerts are a great way of keeping up to date with new articles in your research area. Once you've got a search that gives you the most relevant results, create a search alert and you'll be notified when new articles that match your search criteria are added to the database. The following screencasts show you how it's done in a selection of the databases you have access to through the Library and also through Google Scholar.
Welcome to Science week study tip number 3. It's short and sweet today; just to draw your attention to the amazing amount of quality resources on developing your learning skills while you're studying here at Birkbeck. The Birkbeck Learning Skills and the Library and Information Skills sections on Moodle bring together a great range of resources to help you with different aspects of studying; time management, planning your search for information, how to summarise, paraphrase, quote correctly, managing and using information and much more. This short screencast shows you how to get to them and gives and overview of what's in them.
It's time for Science week study tip 2. Today we're looking at how to find books on a subject that you're interested in. Let's say that you went along to the film screening of Resistance and the panel discussion on Tackling antibiotic resistance and the rise of superbugs and you want to find out more about these topics. A good place to start would be the Library catalogue. The following short screencast shows how you can search the Library catalogue to find books on your topic of interest.
We've put together a list of titles of interest based on the topics being discussed during Science week, so take a look:
