Interesting Scientific Journals

noir_blood

So in order to get credit for my math class, one of the requirements is that I find two scientific journals and recap them. It's nothing indepth, (500 words or so requiremement), but my issue is that I'm having trouble finding the journals. I'm lookimng something that a non-science major could read without any issues. Any recommendations or places you guys can point me to?

corcorigan

Two articles or two entire journals?

Nature and Science are probably a good place to start (although not maths related).

Aldo

I find International Affairs quite OK. They mostly focus on - you guessed it - international politics and geopolitics. Which are subjects a lot of people have an opinion about* and most authors come from social sciences so the language used is less confusing and cryptic than in many other sciences.

Naturally: Science, Nature and The Lancet are amongst the biggest names in academia and the articles published in these journals are often recapped in newspapers and on the news.

I am kind of confused by your question, by the way. How do you recap a complete journal? Are you supposed to describe their history and focus or something? Why do you think there even are journals that laymen can read without any issues? The whole point of journals is that they are written for an educated audience...

*usually a terribly misinformed, simplistic opinion

Trillian

They might have to be peer reviewed articles, in which case the library will have a subscription to journals like that.

Gdiguy

Science and Nature tend to have the most interesting/hottest articles, but because of space constraints they tend to be some of the worst written and most unintelligible if you're not in the field... on the flip side, there will usually be reviews/other articles written about them, which does make a recapping task easier

Are you looking for something Math-oriented, or just general science?

Kistra

If you look at Nature and Science the first half of each journal has general interest articles that are not peer reviewed new research. After that in the "Research" section, the news and views/highlights are written for the lay person and the articles are written for people in the field.

Grizzled

You're going to have to be more specific about what the assignment is. My guess is that it is to read two articles from separate peer-reviewed journals and recap them both, possibly with some sort of comparative analysis (I just finished grading 60 of these papers).

If they have to be scientific journals then International Affairs is probably not the best choice. Since it is for a math class, I assume that the point of the assignment is to get you to look at how math is used/written about in academic/scientific writing outside of the discipline of math itself. Nature and Science are probably not great choices either because they tend to gloss over the methodology and then include all the data in a PDF or something.

If you can give us some more details, I can give you a better idea of how to go about doing it. Also, your university almost certainly has a subscription to databases of journal articles that you can access and download things from, so finding the actual articles won't take more than 15-20 minutes.