Chem445 Prelab Assignments

     Aside from reading the lab notes before class, students will be required to prepare for the lab by submitting, at the beginning of class, one paper photocopied from a scientific journal .  The paper must be related and pertinent to the lab that will be performed, and must be a recent paper (published in last 5 years).  The paper should also contain characterization methods that are identical or related to those that will be performed in the lab.  Approximately 5% of the final course mark will be based on these prelab papers.

     Each paper must be different from those previously handed in by other students.  To ensure that there is no doubling up, the collection of papers will be placed on hold in the library, or watch /chem445/appendices/scilib.htm, for the list of papers that have been submitted to date for each experiment.

     Searching the literature is a good start in preparation for the final lab reports, and give you experience in using scientific journals (something all scientists should learn before graduating).  An excellent way to search online for material is through "Web of Science", http://webofscience.com/, to which the University subscribes.  You can only reach this site from on-campus because full membership is restricted to IP addresses on campus. Click on full search; on the next screen, check the box that is labeled "Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED)--1988-present".  Then select the years of the search; leave as "all years" (default), or you can limit to the search to last few years.  Finally, click on general search and on the next screen you can enter topics or keywords and search (almost) all published journals to date.

     The following are the key journals that will be accepted.  They are all available in the Science Library.  Hyperlinked journals are also available online.  N.B.: If you print out a paper via the web, be sure to print out the pdf format of the paper: html format will not display the figures properly. .