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BIO 111 (Southern Wells High School)

Information tips, tricks, resources, tools, and other for APA/Dual credit BIO 111 at Southern Wells High School.

Journal Types: Scholarly, Popular, Professional

Evalution of information LibGuide
from BSU Libraries

Popular vs. Scholarly

The peer-review process
(a cartoon)

Librarian Profile

Profile Photo
Kevin Brooks
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Contact:
kbrooks2@bsu.edu
Foundational Sciences Library (FB141) &
Health Library (HB101)
765-285-1118

Finding Articles (Tools/Databases, etc.)

Recommended databases and interfaces (ie aggregators)

Researchers want authoritative and accurate sources of information in peer-reviewed or otherwise scholarly publications. The best way to find these types of publications is through a database not a search engine.

Discovery Tools (to begin with):
INSPIRE by subject (try Health & Medicine and STEAM; example keyword "natural selection")
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) a search engine for finding scholarly or academic articles

More focused/in depth:
AGRICOLA covers research agricultural science (e.g. hybridization, entomology, pesticide resistance, etc.)
Public Library of Science (PLoS) (an open access publisher)
PubMed database of life sciences related research articles maintained by the US National Library of Medicine
NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology)

General Research & Reference:
Science.gov all kinds of information here from various US government science and medical agencies

Other useful tools:
WorldCat find books and journal titles in several thousand libraries
DOI (Digital Object Identifier) use this indexing number system to find your article across a variety of databases

Keywords for evolution research

Think like a thesaurus when you are getting started on something you know little to nothing about. It might take you some time to figure out the terminology being used by the experts in the field.

For evolution try: evolution, natural selection, speciation, species, adaptation, mutation, uniformitarianism, selection pressure, allele frequency

For smarter, easier researching...

TIP: Pre-filter your search. Use the filtering and refinement tools to limit or focus your search before you begin.

For instance, if you want to make sure the book (or article- this applies to them, too) is about your subject, use a title field search. Usually, the search tool you are using will have a dropdown menu from which you can select "title" to search for your keyword or keywords in the title fields of the records.

TIP:  Just because it does not say BIOLOGY doesn’t mean it is not relevant to what you are doing. Do not neglect a source because it does not seem to match your topic. For example, another subject area that might apply to biology research would be Health.

TIP: Make sure to look for small icons like this [i] or this near the database link or "more information" links to find out what the database covers.

Using INSPIRE

INSPIRE is Indiana's Virtual Online Library. INSPIRE is a collection of online academic databases and other information resources. It is a free resource available to all Indiana residents who have Internet access.

INSPIRE includes full-text magazine and journal articles, websites, pamphlets, images, almanacs, full-text historic newspapers, multimedia, library catalogs, and much more. In most cases, INSPIRE provides cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts of all articles that appear in every periodical with the exception of some newspapers. Only letters to the editor, advertisements, and some images are excluded for copyright reasons.