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Prof. Mayo SUGGESTIONS FOR YOUR RESEARCH PAPER A. Some Initial Considerations:
B. Research Considerations: You should start with the usual suspects -- e.g., law reviews, state and federal cases and statutes. Research for these will take you to Lexis/Nexis, WestLaw, the West digests, Index to Legal Periodicals and other non-legal periodical indexes, Shephards (or the functional on-line equivalent), etc. Many other sources, however, need to be consulted when writing a bioethics paper. This is partly due to the fast-breaking nature of the subject and partly due to the multi-disciplinary nature of many of the questions that arise in this field. When you map out your research plan, you should consider the following sources: 1. Newspapers and Magazines. Most major daily newspapers and many general-interest magazines run articles of interest to bioethics researchers. Both Lexis and Westlaw have a good assortment of periodicals. The New York Times is not available for more than 24 hours on WestLaw (I believe), so Lexis is the choice for that paper. There are also very complete paper and electronic indexes to periodicals in Underwood. 2. Medical Journals. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) operate the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The NLM puts a lot of things up on its website, but its main attraction is PubMed, which indexes all medical journals in all languages. You can search key words and phrases. Full text may be available through PONI or in the stacks at UT-Southwestern Medical School. (The campus is basically at the corner of Butler Street and Harry Hines Boulevard. You can see a map on the UTSW web site here. Visitor parking is available at Lot 7 and the library is plaza-level around Building D on the map.) If you're really stuck, I have electronic access to most medical journals, so talk to me about what I can find for you.
Of these, only the CMAJ, The Lancet, and BMJ have free, searchable websites with access to back issues. Underwood subscribes to the New England Journal and JAMA. For all other journals, a distinct minority are free and on-line; for those that are, PubMed usually provides a link from the article abstract to the on-line journal. For all others, you will have to try PONI or haunt the stacks of the University of Texas – Southwestern Medical Center library. 3. Bioethics Specialty Journals. You should run into all the useful bioethics journals through PubMed and Lexis/WestLaw, but be particularly on the lookout for these leading journals:
4. Professional Associations. Many medical and nursing professional associations have web pages with useful ethics codes, position and policy statements, legislative agenda information, journal articles, and similar information on a wide array of issues that fall within their areas of expertise and practice experience. Usually a Google search with appropriate key words will uncover a professional association’s page. I have a rather extensive, but by no means complete, list here. 5. Encyclopedias. Underwood has two encyclopedias that will provide a wealth of background information on almost any imaginable bioethics topics: The Encyclopedia of Bioethics (2nd ed. 1995; Warren T. Reich, ed.) and The Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics (1998; Ruth Chadwick, ed.). 6. Bioethics Books. Underwood has a lot of these and many have good indexes. 7. BioLaw. This is a great service, updated about every two months, going back to 1986. The Underwood call letters are KF382/B56/1986. It’s tricky service to learn how to use – there’s a cumulative annual index for each year, but no single cumulative index for all years. There is an Overview volume that is basically a treatise on most bioethics topics, and subsequent volumes contain Update pages (summaries of recent cases, articles, conferences, speeches) and Special Section materials (articles, excerpts from primary sources). 8. WWW. Obviously, the ubiquitous World Wide Web is a fertile source of links to journals, newspapers, television and radio networks, news services, university web pages, professional associations, and just about everything else you could want. Judicious use of the WWW is an important key to effective research. General purpose search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, as well as their news counterparts (Google News and Yahoo News), can be very helpful. I have collected topical links, institutional links, journal links, and other links of potential interest at my bioethics web resources page. As a rule of thumb, you should rely on and cite to internet sources only if no hard copy is reasonably available. A parallel citatation to the web address of a source is not only permitted but encouraged. 9. Federal Bioethics Resources. Both the President’s Council on Bioethics and its predecessor, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission have published reports, position statements, and research papers on a wide variety of topics. 10. Government Pages. Many federal agencies provide a wealth of material. You can either search the web sites of appropriate federal agencies or try a more generic search engine, such as Google Uncle Sam, FirstGov.gov, or the Federal Web Locator. Of course, the library has paper copies of the Code of Federal Regulations, which might be helpful (and which is also located on-line). Pending federal legislation is available through Thomas, as well as Lexis and WestLaw. State bills are available through Lexis and WestLaw, as well as through many (but not all) state legislatures’ web pages. Links to these pages are all collected at a number of WWW sites, e.g.: http://www.govengine.com/; http://www.loc.gov/law/guide/usstates.html; http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/stategov/stategov.html. 11. Other. Your topic may not fit neatly into any of the research categories described above. Feel free – once you have cast your research net broadly and come up empty-handed – to discuss a customized research strategy that will fit your topic more effectively. 12. More Basics. For those of you unsure about what is expected of a research paper, consider the following:
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