A Guide to Making a Science Fair Project
Whether it is writing an essay or conducting a research project, often times, the hardest part is getting started. This guide will help you search through resources that can help you identify and then research a topic for your project. There are three resources that are the most helpful and cover commonly researched topics.
RESOURCES
Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is particularly strong in its coverage of the sciences, containing full text articles for Academic Search Complete contains full text coverage of biology, chemistry, engineering, physics, and psychology.
Health and Wellness Resource Center
Health Reference Center Academic includes the text from eight highly authoritative medical reference resources, access to a collection of 2,200 general interest health publications, a listing of important health web sites, health-related pamphlets and access to recent health news.
Health Reference Center Academic
Health Reference Center Academic includes both general interest publications, medical and professional periodicals and reference materials. It includes some full text resources as well as indexes and abstracts.
EXAMPLES
I am interested in doing something medical-related for my science fair project: where might I be able to get some basic health and medical related information?
Health & Wellness Resource Center has both a medical encyclopedia and a medical dictionary to help give you your bearings. The multimedia library also includes information on some common health-related issues, and these entries include basic information, videos on the topic and recent articles on the subject.
Where can I find recent articles on science and medical topics?
Academic Search Premier and Health and Wellness Resource Center allow you to limit your search by date.
I only want information on science and medical topics from scholarly journals, how can I limit my search to just this material?
Academic Search Premier allows you to either limit your search to scholarly
journals at the outset, or you can limit your results by document type (academic
journals, magazines, newspapers) after you have your initial results returned.
Health Reference Center Academic also allows you to limit your search to
scholarly articles. You can do this by clicking the box for limiting your
research to "refereed publications." Refereed publications are ones that
have been reviewed and approved by other academics of the profession.
TUTORIAL
My science fair project is on the effectiveness of home remedies for hiccups. I am looking for basic information on hiccups and what causes them?
Go to the Health and Wellness Resource Center's website.
Click on the button labeled "Medical Encyclopedia."
This will bring up a list of entries, organized alphabetically. Browse under "H."
Click on the entry for hiccups to bring up the below information.
Additional Internet Resources
The Internet Public Library has a Science Fair Project Research Guide that walks you some of the basic steps involved in a science fair project and provides a extensive list of useful websites:http://www.ipl.org/div/kidspace/projectguide/
The Discovery Channel has created a great resource called "Science Fair Central." It includes project ideas, a science fair handbook, and also information for both teachers and parents about science fairs: http://school.discovery.com/sciencefaircentral/
Scifair.org includes a wealth of information related to science fairs, including information a Science Project Idea Bank, the steps involved in a science fair project, and hints on creating displays and writing reports: http://www.scifair.org/
This page was written by Amelia Brunskill in Spring 2006.
INF 382S: Library Instruction and Information Literacy, taught by Dr. Loriene Roy
School of Information,
The University of Texas at Austin