Biology 1151 Research
Melanie Robinson
Marge Peters� . (630) 942-2337 . petersm@cdnet.cod.edu
1:� FIND YOUR TOPIC
- Think about what interests you: a disease that runs in your family, what you should eat (or not eat!), the effect of a drug (use chemical name, not name sold under), prairies, tropical rain forests...
- Sometimes browsing topics in issues of newspapers or popular/science magazines such as Prevention, Readers Digest, Scientific American, Discover may suggest topics.These popular articles often give you a source to start with, but (BE CAREFUL!) not all of these sources may be research articles -- sometimes you find reports from presentations at conferences, press releases from university labs, or review articles that summarize the consensus of current research.
2: RESEARCH YOUR TOPIC IN JOURNALS
- The words you use are important! Make a list of the terms you want to find in articles you retrieve.
- Find articles in refereed journals (sometimes called peer- reviewed)
Click on "Article Databases" under Quick Links and choose from "Find a database by title.". Each of these databases has a slightly different way of searching . Most allow you to limit to only scholarly journal articles or to full-text only:
- Let's try a search in Expanded Academic Index. Click on "Relevance Search" on the left banner. Type in the terms you want to match. (The database searches for plurals when you enter the singular: diet matches diets, too). Can limit to only Full Text articles and Refereed Journals (research articles) . Another helpful hint: put quotation marks around multi-word terms such as "low carbohydrate" to retrieve the phrase, not individual word. You will retrieve 200 items, with the best matches (most mentions of the words you searched) at the top of the list.
- BE CAREFUL! Although the articles retrieved may be from scholarly journals, they may not be research articles. They could be editorials, bibliographies, review articles and other less research-oriented publications.
- Articles may be full-text / PDF (digitized image) or may be abstract only. If the Library does not have holdings of the journal, be sure to get interlibrary loan of your article if it is abstract-only
Special help for other databases:
Academic Search Premier : Checkmark "Peer-reviewed." Enter terms in find box. Put "and" between separate concepts, quotation marks around multi-word ideas and the truncation symbol (*) to get plurals and other terms based on the word stem: cancer* matches cancer, cancers, cancerous..
Ideal : We have subscribed to a subset of full-text journals from ScienceDirect called Ideal. To get the maximum number of hits, search the entire journal collection, even though you may need to arrange interlibrary loan.
Enter terms in singular form and most of the time the plurals will also be searched. If you want to be sure, enter an exclamation mark (!) as the truncation symbol after the word stem. Change radio button for Dates to "All years." The Basic Search allows two terms to be linked with AND. If you need to link more concepts, use the Advanced search.
If you click the PDF symbol when you retrieve articles and the database asks for a login and password, you know that this is one of the journals we do not subscribe to. Order these articles on Interlibrary Loan
Medline : Medline is known for providing access to the world of medical literature, but it covers a wide range of biological literature as well.
To easily link two or more concepts, choose the Advanced Search. Use the truncation asterisk (*) to get plurals and further terms based on a stem. Very few of the articles resulting will be available full-text, so order these on Interlibrary Loan.
3: CITING SOURCES: MLA & APA Format
