In preparing an essay, your first task is to choose a topic. In this course, you are expected to choose topics from the list provided at the end of the syllabus. Having chosen a topic, you should then search the literature for relevant references and construct a preliminary bibliography. The first of these should be submitted via turnitin.com on the date shown in the syllabus. You will also want to prepare bibliographies for essays 2 and 3, but these need not be turned in.
There are many ways to search for references. For this course, many relevant references are provided here. But you should also search for references on your own, using the tools described below.
Some useful databases are publicly available: two of the best are scholar.google.com (for all the professional literature) and www.pubmed.gov (for health-related topics). Once you find an article on these sites, there will be links to more recent articles that have cited them.
Get it at UofU: Google scholar is excellent right out of the box, but there are ways to tweak it to make it even more useful. Do the following to get the full-text source from Marriott, even when it doesn't show up on google scholar:
Other databases are available only through Marriott Library. One good general database is Academic Search Premier. Another is Scopus, which will pick up recent material across the sciences. Some databases are specific to particular disciplines. For example: Biosis for biology articles.
Don't waste time on articles that are too difficult to read, either because they are poorly written, or because they require advanced training that you lack. Before reading any article carefully, skim to see whether it is accessible and relevant. Read the first few paragraphs and the last few; look at the illustrations and tables; and decide whether the article is worth your time. If it is, then read it a second time, more carefully.