There are many ways to FIND that one article, and you have used (or at least tried) all of these strategies:
Case in point: we now have access to the last 5 years of Nature online, but what do you do if a reference you've found is to an article from 1993? A look at Nature's Annie record reveals that we DO have the title in paper form 1959-.Periodical Finder (linked from the Science Library's various pages) helps to locate journals we have because of some arrangement through an aggregator or publisher, but to which we don't subscribe.
For titles to which we don't have access, InterLibrary Loan may be a necessity for some of you, but you should use it sparingly, and check with your faculty mentor first (some don't want you to use ILL).
It's sometimes important to use these various search tools in combination, to solve problems that arise. Example: let's say you find the text of what's obviously a primary research article on a Website (via a Google search), but it doesn't happen to tell you where it came from:
Relative strengths of top-down and bottom-up forces in a tropical forest community. Dyer, L.A., and D.K. LetourneauAnother example:HOW could you find out its publication details? --and there are several answers:
- follow the link --which in this case is http://www.tulane.edu/~ldyer/ (saw off the end of the URL) and observe that it leads to a link to "selected publications" (http://www.tulane.edu/~ldyer/papers.htm) which has a whole bunch of other material that might be useful
- use the bits of information in the title and/or author field to look up the article in a search tool like CSA or Web of Science --I did a search in WoS for this one, looking for the author Dyer LA, and got 20 hits (17 a year ago). This one turns out to be
Relative strengths of top-down and bottom-up forces in a tropical forest community
Dyer LA, Letourneau DK
OECOLOGIA
119 (2): 265-274 MAY 1999...and has 22 subsequent citers (16 a year ago), several of which are JUST what's needed by this person...
Trying to find a good place to find an accessible primary article on 'transgenic AND cancer' ...where those two words give much too much (4300+ in WoS... add 'models' to cut down to 800+)...so I thought: let's try PNAS, and a search for "transgenic AND cancer" (in Title and Abstract) produces 63 hits, the second being
NM Greenberg, F DeMayo, MJ Finegold, D Medina, WD Tilley, JO Aspinall, GR Cunha, AA Donjacour, RJ Matusik, and JM Rosen
Prostate Cancer in a Transgenic Mouse
PNAS 1995 92: 3439-3443.OK, NOW what? Why not see who has cited that one in the 8+ years since it was published? WoS again: 266 citers (and 43 more than a year ago), so once again we have a good start by putting together a number of searches.
A Google search for 'transgenic cancer mouse greenberg' yields several things, among them the Greenberg Lab's Webpage ...and a Google Scholar search takes us right to the article.
Another possibility for finding material you need is to use the search interfaces of a number of publishers. There's a good deal of overlap in Web of Science and CSA, but sometimes it's helpful to go directly to HighWire or ScienceDirect... or to a journal's own home page (which you can find with a Google search, usually). Thus, PNAS may turn out to be a quick source for a missing article, because the journal covers a very wide range of scientific subdisciplines (and Biology is particularly well represented). Most of the articles are written by --or at least from the labs of-- Members of the National Academy of Sciences ("An Academy member may "communicate" manuscripts for others that are within the member's area of expertise..." --you can see the Editorial Policies for yourself).
Elsevier is the 2-ton gorilla of scientific publishing, currently under attack for its grasping and greedy behavior. The Evil Empire publishes a lot of journals, though we subscribe to only a small number. The ScienceDirect Website allows you to search the whole stable. Articles from titles that we don't have are best retrieved by InterLibrary Loan...
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Finding references is one part of the problem. The next is processing what you find, reading the articles and making annotations to complete the annotated bibliography that the syllabus announced. How do you do that? What's an annotation?
An annotation is a summary in your own words of the content of an article. It is like an abstract, but you can't just rewrite an abstract to produce an annotation. You need to extract the essence of what an article does in the literature, and put that into words. We need an example, so let's use An 85-Year Study of Saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea) Demography Ecology 79: pp. 2676-2693 (1998) (Elizabeth A. Pierson and Raymond M. Turner)The abstract tells us the essence: we're looking at saguaro cactus over time, at "regeneration" and "recruitment" and "episodic surges".The first couple of paragraphs tell us that saguaro is long-lived; that the researchers estimated age by height and inferred regeneration from age structure in stands, that saguaros prefer southern/eastern slopes, and that several censuses have been done (1908, 1910, 1964, 1970, 1993). In the body of the article we see lots of data in the form of graphs of climate and size of cactuses, learn that wet and dry periods affect saguaro regeneration (higher in the wet), and that mortality was due to factors including high winds and predators. The Discussion section tells us that saguaro populations DO fluctuate, surging in some years --and being tied in with "decadal-scale variability" in climate factors, though climate alone is not the full explanation --you have to look at long-term trends.
So: the article seeks to account for observed fluctuations in saguaro, notes that many desert plants have episodic reproductive schedules, and calls for more research (hardly a surprise...).
We could ask who has cited this article, and get some ideas about its significance by looking at the citers and their abstracts. In this case, 20 citers according to WoS (14 a year ago). A glance through these abstracts indicates that the interest is in what accounts for differences and fluctuations --climate, and how measured.
So can we summarize that synopsis in a few sentences?
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I'll finish off by talking about a few examples of information resources that may be useful to you, but their prospective utility for your Bio182 topics is really less important than what they represent in general: these resources are more and more important to how science is increasingly being done, and they are part of an evolution in communication that will be with you all your lives.
The core of this evolution is surely the Internet, and what we've seen in the last 6 weeks has been a parade of electronic applications. New possibilities come along all the time, and it's likely that will continue.
National Science Foundation NSF Search Awards (viz: cabe or hurd) and it's interesting to try W&L...National Institutes of Health NIH CRISP search (viz: maternal AND ethanol)
We have a subscription to the aggregator BioOne (www.bioone.org) --a collection of small presses and organizations that publish journals (viz: salamander)HighWire (www.highwire.org) is another, a host for almost 350 journal titles which offer free text (mostly after 12 months or so) (viz: salamander gets 2670 (1971 last year) hits in full text, lots of free articles...) ...and their TopicMap is a fascinating resource --a different way to VIEW or VISUALIZE literatures. Note that there's a link to HighWire on the Science Web site.
I was very surprised to find more than 100 patents that mention 'salamander'... and in the ninth one to learn a new word (anosmia)... n.b. the kinds of information included are explanations, references, review of "prior art"... certainly a kind of scientific document.anosmia... 12,000+ google hits
kartoo shows the Web in a different way
yahoo another
vivisimo yet another ...and clusty still another
HubMed shows 1971 in Medline for anosmia
OMIM shows 40 entries
And just for fun I did a search in the USPTO database for occurrences of a specific patent (5,393,236) --and found that it's been cited by 34 (32 last year) subsequent patents...
Good place to stop.