<p>This was the last place I wanted to look for help, but here I am.</p>
<p>My professor, whom I'm working for, told me to do lit review on the dissolution of polymers such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate. The idea is to recycle commercial plastics by dissolving them into biodiesel. And right now, I can't for the life of me find the articles I need to read. I've been sitting duck for like 3 hours and the most info I was able to get was from wikipedia in the first half hour.</p>
<p>The professor told me to use this one search engine to find publications I can read to learn more. I've used all the keywords I could possibly use, and the outcome have been either "no results found" or a buttload of useless articles that are completely unrelated and difficult to read.</p>
<p>try sagepub and go to the online journals area. Then you can find the journals at your school library (probably online there too). OR you can go to advanced search and try different search words…but… under format use condensed and 80 per page. You can then do quick scrolls to find any that are fully free on that site - you may find a few.</p>
<p>you need to look through academic journals, not wikipedia. i’m not sure what the science equivalent of JSTOR is, but you should look for e-journal or database listings on your school’s library website. you’ll also need to get a little more creative with your search keywords and just keep digging. have you looked through the online editions of science or nature?</p>
<p>sagepub doesn’t help me. As for my school’s library website, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I can’t think of anymore keywords. Right now, it doesn’t seem like hit and miss, there’s NOTHING to be found.</p>
<p>how long is a lit review suppose to take anyway? Because my professor is letting me count these hours into my work hour, and I don’t want to put down a big number and p1ss her off.</p>
<p>Lit reviews usually take a few weeks depending on the scope of your project, but usually no less than 1 week. Once you find your first few articles, everything else will come along a lot quicker. </p>
<p>Try using “hydrocarbons” instead of biodiesel as a key word that should definitely give you something useful. Also, I ditto Google Scholar as a good search engine. There’s also scirus.org which will search any science based source (so it will give more than just journal articles).</p>
<p>If you aren’t getting any hits in a scholarly database (and make sure you are using the right one), then pair down the keywords. I would be shocked if “dissolution of polymers” doesn’t yield any results.</p>
<p>Most universities have a long list of databases, and it’s important to find the one(s) that applies to your field.</p>
<p>The thing is polymer is a really broad subject, and there’s a lot of papers that I have no idea what they’re about. And when I slim the search down to plastics, namely polypropylene, I get basically nothing.</p>
<p>Don’t worry, I’m getting the hang of it now.</p>
<p>Someone above said that a lit review shouldn’t take less than 1 week. Is this true? Because I’ve dragged mine on for a while now because I’m kind of busy. I’m an undergrad freshmen, so I doubt I need to know nearly as much as you grad students or upperclassmen.</p>