Terminology, continued: this week's subject will send you off to look for summaries of research in the subfield to which your topic belongs. You will continue to develop the "cloud" of linked terms as you find more things to look at and read, and you'll need to become clear in your own mind what your topic really is, and ask yourself: what is the level of specificity? Can you alter that specificity, redefine the general to be more specific (that is, define a subpart that you'll concentrate on), or broaden to cover more cases and include a wider range of literature? You'll want to do such redefinitions in consultation with your faculty mentor.I thought I'd start this week by looking at an article that showed up two years ago in Science just before this point in the term, to make the general point that you can start anywhere and weave (tie?) an elegant and productive macramé of connections. The article that caught my eye as a starting place was Collapse and Conservation of Shark Populations in the Northwest Atlantic (Julia K. Baum, Ransom A. Myers, Daniel G. Kehler, Boris Worm, Shelton J. Harley, Penny A. Doherty Volume 299, Number 5605, Issue of 17 Jan 2003, pp. 389-392)Each search is part of a story, an epic of discovery, likely to be filled with surprises.
Daniel Kehler is the son of dear friends of mine, a PhD Biology student at Dalhousie, a person I've known since he was about 3 months old. I had no idea when I picked up the article that he was involved... serendipity, they say...)This is a primary or research article, no doubt about it. The article presents an analysis of data ("We present an analysis of logbook data for the U.S. pelagic longline fleets targeting swordfish and tunas in the Northwest Atlantic..."), the primary criterion for 'primary'. It's a good example of the morphology of this kind of information, so let's look at its pieces:
For the moment I want to focus on the first paragraph of the article's text:
Human exploitation has propagated across land, coastal areas, and the ocean, transforming ecosystems through the elimination of many species, particularly large vertebrates (1, 2). Only in the past half century, as fishing fleets expanded rapidly in the open ocean, have large marine predators been subject to this intense exploitation. Many species, including tuna, billfishes (3), and sea turtles (4), are of immediate conservation concern as a result. Among the species impacted by these fisheries, sharks should be of particular concern. Despite their known vulnerability to overfishing (5, 6), sharks have been increasingly exploited in recent decades, both as bycatch in pelagic longline fisheries from the 1960s onward (7) and as targets in directed fisheries that expanded rapidly in the 1980s (8). The vast geographic scale of pelagic marine ecosystems constrains our ability to monitor shark populations adequately. Thus, the effect of exploitation on sharks has, for most populations, remained unknown (9). Shark management and conservation have been hindered by the lack of knowledge on their status or even the direction of the population trends.Often (but not always) the first paragraph will point to one or more review articles, summaries of research on the broader subject of which the article is a detailed examination. In this case, the first reference (to Alroy 2001) is not a 'review' , but the second almost certainly is... so we need to take a look at its morphology:
What was natural in the coastal oceans? (Jeremy B. C. Jackson Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 98, Issue 10, 5411-5418, May 8, 2001)So your problem is: how to find analogous sources for YOUR topic? Several strategies to explore:The heading tells us that this is a "Colloquium Paper" --and the Colloquium turns out to have been on The Future of Evolution --more than one person in the class might find the paper by Mooney and Cleland The evolutionary impact of invasive species a useful source...)
Jackson 2001 has a hefty bibliography (an earmark of review articles), and at the bottom we find links to several citations by other authors. A search in Web of Science (which we'll look at in more detail shortly) reveals that the article has been cited by 41 subsequent authors, including Gell FR, Roberts CM Benefits beyond boundaries: the fishery effects of marine reserves TRENDS ECOL EVOL 18 (9): 448-455 SEP 2003, and DISTURBANCE TO MARINE BENTHIC HABITATS BY TRAWLING AND DREDGING: Implications for Marine Biodiversity (Simon F. Thrush and Paul K. Dayton Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 2002. 33:449-473) We are offered a link to "similar articles" in the same title, and the bibliography plunges us into 180+ items whose significance is summarized in the text of the article. This one has been cited by 10 subsequent authors since its publication.One more thing about how the article in Science appears: look at the box on the right, which offers 'Search for similar articles' and 'Search for citing articles'. Such features are now common in many online resources, and provide enormous power. Think about how they work: the "similar articles" invokes some sort of algorithm that trolls an enormous database and finds... what? Overlapping terminology? Shared citations? It's different for each publisher or search engine, but it's one of those features that makes electronic access to scientific literatures vastly better than it was only a few years ago.
I see that there's a link to Web of Science, which lists 21 citers of the article
In short, one article leads to another... and soon there's an interconnected literature about a topic. That's the kind of thing you're going to build for your topic.
We have a brand new tool, RefWorks, that will make your lives MUCH easier, and that MAY turn out to be extremely valuable for managing the references you encounter in ALL your courses. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is automatic formatting of bibliographies, but it's really more important as a management tool. It lives at www.refworks.com, and you'll need to create an account, and log in each time you use it --but it will follow you wherever you go, and keep track of your accumulated references!
So we need to look at some search tools:
Example: say I've been dealt the topic "What is the effect of habitat fragmentation on gene flow and population structure in terrestrial species?". If I go to http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/search and search for habitat fragmentation, I get 588 hits; if the search is for "habitat fragmentation" I get 36 hits, some of them quite recently published.Look through the titles --and reflect that the phrase "habitat fragmentation" is in fact of interest to several of you --even if it hadn't occurred to you to include it in your 'cloud of terminology'. For example, there's one with the title ROADS AND THEIR MAJOR ECOLOGICAL EFFECTS... of interest to at least one person.
A search for 'h5n1' gets TWO, probably excellent background. Why nothing more recent?
In short, Annual Reviews are very useful sources.
Dukes JS, Mooney HAThis one cites 50 sources, and has been cited by 95 subsequent writers (73 last year... so it's still 'hot'). Looking through those 95 just can't be a bad idea. And look at the magic "Find Related Records" button --which produces 4445 (last year 3886) articles that overlap to a greater or lesser degree in their bibliographies. The downside is that we don't have a good many of these journals. But let's look up "Trends in Ecology and Evolution" as a TITLE in Annie... we find that there is an electronic edition, and that we can retrieve that article.
Does global change increase the success of biological invaders?
TRENDS ECOL EVOL 14 (4): 135-139 APR 1999
A search for H5N1, limited to Review, finds 40
"endocrine disrupters" gets 116 when so limited ...and might be of interest to more than one person...
A search for H5N1 AND PT=review gets 47 hits, including several that are not in the Web of Science set.
Of course, the question is whether we have a particular journal... and it can be answered in several ways:
Another common problem is decoding a journal's abbreviation --and there's a link to help with that on the Science Library's main page (Journal Abbreviations).
For the moment I'll just mention the InterLibrary Loan service, which is the solution to the problem of getting materials we don't have. More later...