October 22-26 was the first statewide STEM week, to accelerate student engagement in science and technology. Bunker Hill Community College participated in STEM week with various presentations and demos to students.
ReFigure’s presentation was an introductory, interactive session to introduce Community College to scientific literature, new tools to make finding, reading scientific literature easy and finally to build an online presence by sharing scientitic news. Predictably, when asked where students would search for the papers the first answer was: “Google”. Girija Goyal, the main speaker and co-founder of ReFigure, talked about issues that may arise when using Google search. For example, without understanding different levels of access, students are confused when they see the abstract but not the full article until they pay the fee. Mentioning this particular problem laid a background for introducing students to Open Access.
While some students were familiar with PubMed, they didn’t know about PubMed Central, a website where all articles were freely available to be read in full. In addition, Open Knowledge Maps tool was demonstrated to show how using this tool allows to easily search for a variety of scientific articles on the certain topic.
Various literature management tools, including ReFigure, were presented to students. It was pointed out that ReFigure was a great tool for people who are visual learners. In addition, ReFigures may include analysis of the article or some ideas (that could be written in the notes section) and be added to a cover letter to present to prospective employer. As a bunker hill alumna, I was able to share my experience in demonstrating my knowledge of neuroscience using ReFigure to a laboratory which I was interested in joining. This presentation, attended by dozens of Community College students, was very successful, since students were excited to learn about presented tools and the FREE undergraduate course designed by ReFigure undergrads to delve deeper and help undergraduate prepare a knowledge base in a chosen topic. The ReFigure team were excited to give their first presentation to undergrads, and we are looking forward to participating in other undergraduate research related events.
