Primary literature continued

The basic insight into scientific literature: it's all connected. Citations are the mechanism of linkage. Find one, and that will lead you to others. That is at least a viable strategy, though it's important to realize that you always need to integrate new terminology into searches: reading an article may suggest another way to search, and that may lead you to related but unconnected --or indirectly connected-- research.

There are many ways to FIND that one article, and you have used (or at least tried) all of these strategies:

You need to know how to move around in this landscape of resources, and you need to develop a sense for what these things ARE, and where they can be found. A lot of science journals do have electronic online versions, but most also have PAPER versions, and you need to know how to find them when you need them.
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. Letourneau

HOW could you find out its publication details? --and there are several answers:

Another example:
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.

Good place to stop.