BIO 101
Hello, Biology 101 students! I'm Charlotte
Ford, one of the librarians at the University
of
Montevallo's Carmichael Library. As part of
your BIO 101 class, we have created 2
videos and a handout to help you locate articles
published by the Biology Faculty at UM.
In this first video, I'll show you how to
navigate to the Carmichael Library website
and
will talk about some the services the library
offers, including helping students distinguish
between scholarly and popular articles.
In the second video, we'll look at some of
the library databases where you can find
scientific research articles, and we'll walk
through that process. Specifically, we'll
talk
about finding articles written by UM Biology
faculty. Your professor, Dr. Wicknick, has
a
handout in Canvas summarizing the steps.
First, let's talk about navigation. How do
you get to the Carmichael Library website?
Probably the easiest way is to Google "Montevallo
Library". The first result will take you
to the library website. The library website
is also linked from many pages on the UM
website, as well as from Canvas (we're under
the Question Mark). As a college student,
you may want to bookmark the library website,
since you may be using it repeatedly.
The direct URL is libguides.montevallo.edu
On the library website, the first thing you'll
probably notice is this big search box that
dominates the page. This is our Discovery
System, and when you do a search in here
(Lyme Disease), you'll be searching across
the library catalog of print books and e-
books and a bunch of other databases that
include journal articles, magazine articles,
films, and so forth. This is a very broad
search, and while it gets a lot of results,
it's not
always the most efficient way to find scholarly
or scientific research articles. More on
that in Video #2!
You'll also see, over to the right, options
to "chat with a librarian" or to send us an
email
when we're offline. This "chat" option will
pop up on the library website sometimes too.
Please feel free to ask us any questions about
using library databases or anything else
that is puzzling you. There are 7 librarians
and 5 staff members who are here to help
you. This Fall, the library is open 7 days
a week, until 10 PM Sunday thru Thursday and
until 5 PM on Friday and Saturday.
Under the search box, you'll find some important
purple buttons.
Databases links to a list of more than 125
databases filled with articles and other
resources that are available to you. You can
access these from on-campus or from off-
campus by logging in with your UM ID and password.
Research guides links to guides for classes
that UM librarians work with. We'll dig in
there in just a second.
WorldCat links to a database where you can
search the books available in libraries
across the world!
And "Ask for Help" is another way to access
chat, email, and phone #s
Now let's follow the Research Guides link.
If you click on Biology, you'll see your class
listed there. This is the Research Guide for
BIO 101, to help you locate research articles
by Biology Faculty. The direct URL is
libguides.montevallo.edu/bio101 .
That's me, over there.
And this is a chart showing a simplified version
of the Scientific Method of Research,
which you're all familiar with.
The library fits into this picture in a couple
of places. One is here, where scientists
report results. When scientists report results,
their ultimate goal is usually to get that
report PUBLISHED as an ARTICLE in a SCIENTIFIC
JOURNAL. In order for that to
happen, their report has to be evaluated by
a group of their PEERS, or fellow scientists,
and accepted for publication. When a report
is published as an article in a scientific
journal, you "the reader" can then access
that article through the library databases.
Libraries subscribe to databases to help provide
students, faculty, and other
researchers access to reports of research
that have been peer-reviewed and published
in journals.
The other place the library fits into this
picture is up at the top. When researchers
are
making observations, asking questions and
formulating hypotheses, they're also looking
at what's already known, they're building
on the work of scientists who came before
them. And how do they access that research?
By looking for articles in library
databases.
Let's go to the second tab on this research
guide scholarly vs. popular articles. When
you're looking for scientific research, you're
looking for scholarly articles, that is,
articles that are written by scholars and
are peer-reviewed.
Here's an example of a scholarly article about
Lyme Disease, published in the New
England Journal of Medicine (vol 374 #13).
The NEJM is a peer-reviewed journal,
which means this research was reviewed by
other scientists before it was published.
Note the scientific title of the article;
the fact that it has multiple authors, and
they are
affiliated with universities or scientific
organizations; it has an abstract, which
summarizes the research; and it has the classic
sections of a scholarly research
articles: an introduction which refers to
previous articles written about this topic,
and
then methods, results, and discussion sections,
and
a list of references 
at the end. It's
filled with charts and written in the language
of a scientific report.
Here's a different kind of article about Lyme
Disease: A popular article, written for the
general public. It appears in Discover magazine,
has a single author (who's a freelance
science journalist) and is written in the
easy-to-understand style of a magazine. While
the author did talk to a couple of scientists,
she doesn't cite scholarly research articles
and she is not reporting the results of scientific
research. There's no list of references
at 
the end. There are, however, ads!
On the library research guide for BIO 101,
there's a table summarizing some of the
main differences between scholarly research
articles and popular articles. Please
review the chart and if you're up for it,
you can take a quiz to review your understanding.
Just to summarize: so far we've talked about
how to navigate to the Carmichael Library
website; explored some of the library resources
and services; and talked about
distinguishing between scholarly and popular
articles. In the second video for BIO 101,
we'll talk about how to use library databases
to find scholarly research articles written
by
University of Montevallo Faculty. I'll see
you in Video #2!
