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PHYS 6900: Project Guidelines

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Important Dates

Project Goals

The project goals are:

Literature Review

For the literature review, you MUST use the methods suggested to find relevant research articles. The process of doing the literature is as important as the articles you find. See Literature Search Methodology below.

Presentation [Date 1]

A short oral presentation in class. Remember that noone in class knows anything about the subject you are covering and your goal is for them to learn:

Due to the time limits (15 minutes for the presentation, 5 minutes for discussion) the presentation will have to leave out a lot of detail contained in the paper. Part of the preparation will be to figure out what to leave out. All students are required to attend all presentations and participate by asking questions. Each participant will be preassigned one paper and presentation to critique and a draft paper should be made available to them. The critique should be returned to the speaker by Date 2. P.S. The critique will now happen before the presentation, Nov 24 is the date presentations should be exchanged, Nov 26, suggestions for improvement should be emailed.

Paper [due Date 3 or 2 days after presentation]

The paper, approximately 2500 - 3500 words, will be based on the plan you have submitted (minor modifications o.k.). While the scope and extent can vary, make sure that the basics are covered. We have not covered experimental methods and techniques in soft condensed matter physics in any great detail in class, and one of the goals of the presentations is to fill in those gaps.

Literature Search Methodology

Read any popular information on the experimental technique that you can find (on wikipedia for example). While wikipedia is a good place to start a search it is not an acceptable reference. Neither are other computer sources. Then find a computer with internet access where you can spend some time. On campus, you have access to ejournals and citation databases. Offcampus, you will need to set up a .proxy.. Look at the library website or speak to a librarian for more info.

Click on "Article Search", then on "W", then pick "Web of Science" Make sure you have "Web of Science" not "Web of Knowledge". WOS has more features. It will let you order your search by number of citations. You should restrict your search to articles no more than 10 years old.

You can search by topic and/or author. Make your search more specific by using multiple keywords. For example: small angle neutron scattering AND (polymer OR liquid crystal) or Raman microscopy AND lipids. You will get a bunch of hits with most recent first. Click on likely ones. You will get to a page with a record of the article containing the following:

If the abstract means anything to you, pick a paper by its abstract. If not, look at the Times Cited. You can reorder the articles by the .Number of Times Cited. and so get the most relevant ones. If it looks relevant, download the paper and read the first paragraph. The articles cited in the first paragraph are likely important ones. Again, the number of citations is a good indicator. The process is iterative. The first article you check is unlikely to be a good representative article, but it likely cites a good representative article in the first paragraph. The first target of the project is to get collect about 10 representative articles, print out the record of each article.

Its a good idea to have the target of 10 while you search: don't stop when you get to 10 even though you have 500 hits; refine your search until you get fewer, more relevant hits. If you have not spent a few hours on this, you have not worked hard enough (and it will show). The process of refining your search will help you figure out the important keywords in the field. Hand in the results of your search (print out the abstracts for your top 10 articles) with a 1 paragraph summary in complete sentences of what (keywords) you plan to explore.