Literature search:
To a large extent you will rely for your protein on bits and pieces of knowledge/data that is scattered throughout databases and published literature. Before you start with your own work, it is particular important that you familiarise yourself with what is known about your protein. Searching (and reading) published literature for your protein is a good starting point, as it will give you the necessary background information.
For literature searches I recommend to use several services, since each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses and combining their search results will give you better coverage of the relevant literature:
The PubMed search for your protein is directly linked from the Target PDB Table, and since you have already used PubMed in previous pracs no further explanation is necessary here.
Everyone has used Google searches. Scholar Google allows you to conveniently search for published documents and often lets you download the full documents. In addition the search result provides information on what other articles have cited the work, which is of particular interest if you want to explore the context in which your protein is important.
UQ provides access to this commercial literature search engine. Follow the link Web of Science and then General Search. Similar to Scholar Google you can now search by key words, authors and/or other search options. Later on, also explore the multitude of other services provided on this site.
All the search results are linked to further information, such as abstracts, references in that article and papers that cite that article. This lets you often explore a whole body of related literature starting from a single key reference. However, I recommend searching the literature from many different angles, since isolated groups of researches are sometimes not aware of other isolated groups and therefore cross-references are missing. The disadvantage of [www.isiknowledge.com ISI Knowledge] is that full length articles are not always linked to the search results. However, UQ has subscription to nearly every journal you can imagine and most articles can be downloaded when you go through the UQ Library Website. First search for the journal name in which the article was published. If UQ is subscribed to the journal you will find a link to the journal's homepage, from which you generally can download the article.
Note: Since you will need many of the articles you found in your searches later in your final paper (and your studies) it is a good idea to start organising them right from the beginning. A convenient way to do this is to create a new Wiki page under your project for all papers of interest. Give the full reference (you can directly copy and paste this information from the search page) and upload the full paper. If appropriate group them and use headings/sub-headings. An organised library of relevant literature will greatly help you and your collaborators to keep up with each others' findings and avoid duplication of work.
--ThomasHuber 16:26, 25 April 2007 (EST)
