Hello again, Biology 101 students! I'm Charlotte
Ford, a librarian at the University of Montevallo,
and this is the second of 2 library videos
for BIO 101. In this video, we'll look at
some of the library databases that are useful
for biologists, and we'll search for articles
in these databases.
As our starting point, we'll navigate to Carmichael
Library, and then to the research guide for
BIO 101. Click on the Find Scholarly Articles
tab to get to the databases we're talking
about right here in the center box. These databases are also linked from
the library's big "Databases" list that we
saw in Video #1, but we've pulled together
the most useful ones for you in this research
guide.
The first 3 databases listed are BioOne, GreenFILE,
and PubMed. These databases SPECIFICALLY pick
up articles in biology and other life sciences.
Each one of them allows you to search for
articles by author, subject, title, keyword, and other
facets as well.
I'll demo a search in each of them... but, so as not to give you too much of an advantage
in looking for articles by your Biology
professors, I'll search for articles by a
biology professor I had when I was an undergraduate.
That was a while ago, but he was a great professor
and I remember him well. His name is John
Iverson, and his primary research interest
is turtles and other reptiles.
So let's hop into the first one, BioOne. This searches more than 200 journals in biology, ecology, and environmental sciences and we've got this simple search box right here.
I'm just going to put in his name John Iverson and see what comes up.
So there it picks up some indexes, don't really want those, I want articles. So this looks like it might be him.
Click on that.
And it sounds like him, working with a couple of other authors.
You can always check the author affiliation.
This journal article appeared in Herpetological Monographs, volume 18, issue 1, pages 1 - 36, 2004.
Here's the abstract, and as you scroll down that's the rest of the article.
But let's say, I'm going to back up, let's say I really wanted something about John Iverson and turtles.
I can go to this Advanced Search screen
And I can put in his name, and say, I want to search him in the author field, and I want to search something about turtles.
You narrow down the search that way and hopefully get some results, some articles written about turtles
That looks very promising. There's John B. Iverson, here's an article about turtles, tortoise and turtle distributions, the red cheeked mud turtle...
So that would be a way to do a more advanced search in BioOne.
Alright, I'm going to close out BioOne - Let's go into GreenFile.
GreenFile searches articles in biology and environmental sciences, there's some overlap with BioOne but it's not exactly the same.
I'm going to put in the author's name again
Click on the Search
Ooh, your initial search query did not yield any results!
But, I think that's because I searched for John Iverson, and here I see it picked up Iverson, John B.
Well, that's him, and it looks like an article about turtles.
Again, you can dig a little deeper, evaluate it, sounds like a promising search result.
I'm going to back up, though, to that results list.
Look at the second one.
That actually is not John Iverson.  This picked up Samuel Iverson and John... someone else.
And when I look at that title, that also does not sound like his research area.
So always evaluate the results you're getting.
Some of the results you get may be right on target, like this one.
Others may be, "That's not John!"
Scroll down a litte further, there's that iguana article again, and that's by John Iverson.
So you always need to evaluate what you're getting in the search results.
I'm going to exit GreenFile, and let's go into PubMed.
So we're launching PubMed. This is a huge, powerful database.
30 million citations to articles, many, many full-text articles
We'll do our search simply on John Iverson for now.
And we get a number of results
Now notice, in this database, the authors are listed just with their initials.
So again, you would want to assess, is that really the author I'm searching for, JB Iverson?
It's a very sophisticated database, I can search for John Iverson and it will bring back articles tagged as JB Iverson but that are actually John Iverson.
But that looks like him - "Turtles and tortoises are in trouble."
This is about "reptilia,"that's probably an article that he collaborated on.
So I'm seeing, definitely, it is picking up some things by John Iverson.
I could also, if I wanted to specify, add in "turtles" or another search term to limit it more specifically
In PubMed, since it's such a huge database
there's a lot of full text and other things that are not full text
and notice that you can limit it if you want to bring up full-text articles or free full-text.
Notice, too, that it has a simple search box and an advanced search box, so you can get fancy if you want.
So we're going to exit PubMed.
I want to point out a few more databases.
We've also listed here some general databases that are useful for finding scientific articles:
Academic Search Premier, Academic OneFile, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and Google Scholar.
These are broader than the 3 databases above.
They search across a wide variety of databases including
life sciences journals but also other kinds of journals, so you have to be a little more deliberate when you're searching these.
I'll demo 2 of them. First, Academic Search Premier
We'll try "John Iverson" - and we'll be a little more specific since we know it's a big general database.
One of the things you can do in this database is, check the box that says Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals
If you want to limit it to scholarly research journals.
This is important because, as a broad database, it picks up lots of magazines and other things.
And again, I get some results
Title, author, journal, there's the date, volume, issue.
Some are full-text, others are not.
I'm going to get out of Academic Search Premier
And the other one I wanted to show you is Google Scholar.
This casts a wide, rough net
What's nice about Google Scholar is that it does include a lot of full text.
Some in library databases, some posted on university websites,
Some posted on other independent sites.
Again, always evaluate your search results to make sure you're looking at the right author.
We're going to exit Google Scholar
Come back to this
And finally, we included here at the bottom of that central column
The Discovery Search Box
You can do a search in here as well, but remember that when you do
You're going to be searching across books, ebooks, films, journals, magazines,
It's a very, very broad search.
So use that Discovery search with care.
So that concludes our database tour.
Now when you look at the left of this page
, you’ll find a  list of UM Biology Professors
with links to the faculty profiles that are on the UM Biology website.
There's Dr. Wicknick's link
and this is important to explore before you do your searching
because it describes their research interests
That way you can be sure when you get results
that yes, I think I've found the correct Jill Wicknick in this database.
Closing that out and returning to the research guide
to the right, you will see a box with a link to the handout
to guide you in your search thru the databases
Dr. Wicknick will also post this handout in Canvas.
So this concludes our tour of the databases
and you should now be able to identify some databases SPECIFIC to Biology
as well as some general databases that include many types of articles, including biology articles
and you should be prepared to look for research articles written by UM Biology Faculty Members
I wish you luck with your assignment, and please get in touch if we can help in any way!
Good luck!
