Using Online resources

The internet has fast become the tool of choice in locating resources for papers, lab reports and assignments. It provides a wealth of information at your fingertips and we, the Biology department, encourage you to take advantage of this! Unfortunately, all this greatness does not come without its challenges. 1) How do you find what you’re looking for in such an immense amount of material? 2) How do you know that what you’ve found is reliable? The following section is intended to give you some helpful tips and guidelines as to how to effectively make use of online resources.

Effective Search Terms
Learning to use effective search terms is your first step toward efficient and successful use of online sources. People often use search terms that are either too broad, resulting in an overwhelming number of largely irrelevant hits, or terms that are too specific resulting in very few hits or information that is too specific to be helpful. Finding the right level of search specificity is an important skill. There are also some simple notations and word usage tips that can help refine your search terms to quickly and efficiently find useful information.

• Spell correctly!
• Use more words than less. Many people only include one or two words in their search terms! The more words you use, the fewer and more specific hits you’ll get e.g. Methylation (268, 000 hits) vs. DNA methylation EcoRI bacteria (9,210 hits)
• Use nouns and try to include modifiers that help describe them e.g. ion-exchange chromatography rather than chromatography
• Use synonyms. Not all papers will use the same terms or phraseology so be sure to try a number of different searches using synonymous search terms. Ex. genome stain moss; moss amount DNA; moss DNA quantification
• Use quotation marks around key phrases e.g. “drosophila life cycle” (751 hits) vs. drosophila life cycle (993,000 hits)
• Be intentional with your ‘commands’. Using commands are a simple and quick way to refine your search. Remember that when searching with Google, all commands must be in uppercase. Ex. AND, +, OR, AND NOT, – , *
• Use specific search terms. Try and pick out key words from your experiment or topic that aren’t commonly used in everyday language or in other disciplines. Ex. Fly food contamination vs. drosophila media contamination
• Include authors in your search. If you know the name of an author working in the field of you topic area, including their name can either help pull up their papers or other related papers that have cited them.
• Use Latin. Searching with the Latin name of species provides improved specificity as common names can vary from place to place. If location is of interest to you, try combining the Latin name with the common name.
• Include ‘review’ in your search terms. It can be helpful as it will pull up pull up articles which review current research. This allows you to get a lot of relevant information on your topic in one place. From there you can simply select the papers it cites that are of interest to you.
• Use the “advanced search” option if it is available.

Selecting sources

Unfortunately, not all sources you find online are trustworthy. This can create some confusion and frustration when trying to research on a particular topic or find sources that can serve as acceptable references. The purpose of references is to verify truth. When you are reading a source, the natural question you should be asking is, “is this information true?” If you are going to base a project or an experiment on a piece of information gleaned from a source, you need to know the information is reliable or you will be wasting your precious time and resources. Just because someone on cyberspace says there are blue bears, doesn’t mean you should design your graduate thesis on the effect of blue fur colour on bear mating success. Don’t be foolish!

Discernment is the key. When trying to select valid scientific sources, try and stick to peer reviewed articles, government sites, etc. Generally, beware of websites with flashing and dancing cartoons and NEVER cite anything obtained from discussion threads, blogs, or information from Jo Shmoe’s Greenhouse (just an example). Although they may contain valid information, there is no way to verify it. A good rule of thumb is to limit your resources to those that would most likely not be modified in the course of a 20 year period. Below notes on some common sites that may prove helpful in your sourcing endeavors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

Oh so tempting – but resist! If you are brand new to a topic and simply want a basic grasp of the material, Wikipedia is great place to start. It can also lead you to some great reference quality resources through the cited section at the bottom, BUT, Wikipedia should NEVER be relied upon as a valid reference. The reasons for this are very good and are as follows:

• Anyone can contribute content. YOU can add content. It is an encyclopedia ‘of the people’. Thus, it is susceptible to both misinformation and vandalism and its content cannot be considered reliably verified.
• It is constantly changing. You may reference something and your reader, interested in more information, will go to the link and be unable to find that piece of information.
• To demonstrate the changing behaviour of Wikipedia click on this link to see the history of changes to TWU’s Wikipedia page.

The Web of Science is highly recommended. It is a citation database and allows you to not only search for a particular topic, author or journal but also for journal citations. Very handy! It means if you have a good article already, you can find further research that has been done on that topic by searching for articles that have referenced your article. This is an easy way to follow the ‘flow’ of research that has been done on your topic. It also has some great tools to help sort and analyze your search results.

Although Web of Science primarily provides abstracts, it includes a “Where can I get this?” feature. This provides links that will search other locations, such as the TWU library, Google Scholar and other libraries, for the full text.

Webs of Science can be accessed through TWU’s library homepage. http://www.twu.ca/twu-library/ Select ‘Article Indexes & Databases’. From the study areas provided, select ‘Interdisciplinary’ and click on ‘Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science’).

Google Scholar (not Google!) searches through online peer-reviewed journals, theses, books, abstracts and articles from academic sources and thus is a great tool for finding useful references. It covers a broad range of fields from botany to biochemistry, is fast and easy and often provides full text articles!

Although this site is limited to the life sciences and biomedical side of biology it is a free archive of full text articles provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/

This site boasts the largest collection of free full-text science articles in the world – big claim! They’ve recently done a lot of work to improve their ease of use and advance search features. http://highwire.stanford.edu

JSTOR

Trinity Western University has full –text access to historical articles, but usually has restrictions on publications newer than 3-5 years within JSTOR. Click here to see available journal subscriptions.
Covers topics in Life Sciences and Ecology& Botany.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/

Full text access is available for most journal titles from 1997 to present. Subject areas include earth and environmental science, life sciences.