CONDUCTING YOUR RESEARCH
Before you begin your search, you'll need a clear idea of what you want to discover. You may want just to browse first--either in your library or on the Internet. If you begin with a general subject, you may get plenty of information from whatever turns up first, or you might get more specific information (closer to what you really want), by taking time to narrow your search precisely (see General Guidelines for a Research Project). In any case, you'll need some words to type in to tell the computer what you want.
Searching in the Library
A good place to begin is with an encyclopedia. For example the free Internet Encylopedia and Encyclopedia Britannica are available online (http://www.eb.com/) or may be installed in computers in your library. Alternatively, an encyclopedia may be part of your word-processing program or in the reference section of your on-line service.
Start with the first phrase of your topic: "mercury poisoning." Columbia Encyclopedia (part of Bookshelf with Microsoft Word) gives two subject listings: for Mercury (obviously the planet, not the car) and mercury--but no listing for mercury poisoning. The article on mercury includes several topics highlighted and underlined which you can click, jumping to related articles--on pollution and environmentalism among others. Before following these leads, jot down any keywords to use for your search as well as any facts of general information that piqued your interest.
You could then go to the Science Citation Index, Medline, or Business Index (on CD-ROMs, installed in designated computers in many libraries. When you are asked to type the words to search for, select some of the keywords you jotted down. See Understanding Where the Information Is: Databases for other databases to try.
With a topic such as mercury poisoning, you will probably use more articles than books to get your information. However, check the library catalog as well--using some of the keywords for a subject search, as well as the names of any experts you came across for a search by author (to see if your library has any books written by these experts).