There's nothing particularly special about this article (from Ecology vol 74 pp 1153-1156, 1993), but it does encapsulate what we need to consider in a tidy space (4 pages total). The article's structure is clear, and its identity as a report of research conducted is unquestionable.
If I had started with the topic "inbreeding avoidance" it's one I might have found easily, since it appears in Periodical Abstracts Online (but not, as it happens, in Expanded Academic Index). The full text is available through JSTOR (and there's a link to the electronic archive of Ecology on the Annie record for the journal), and I could have found it via UnCover or Cambridge Scientific Abstracts --but, interestingly enough, not via FirstSearch (not in BasicBIOSIS, which only goes back to 1994; and not in AGRICOLA, though there are other "inbreeding avoidance" articles in AGRICOLA).
In other words, there's no single source that has "everything"
In any case, each database that does have this article represents it slightly differently: PAO gives a brief summary that doesn't really do justice to the full abstract; JSTOR assigns some keywords, but they're not the same as those which decorate the CambSciAbstr record (which offers a set of descriptors which could be used to find other similar articles).
I did a search of Annual Reviews of... for "inbreeding avoidance" and got zero --so I searched the more general "inbreeding" and got an interesting set of 9 articles, several of which seem likely to be relevant to my quest to understand the topic and the research done upon it.
In Fall 1997 we had access to ISI's Web of Science, and it allowed me a view that was impossible with other products. I include my description of what ISI led to, despite the fact that it's no longer available to us:
I did a search for "inbreeding avoidance" and got 18 hits, one of which was Bollinger et al. 1993. Examining the record (which I've given you as a handout) we findI also tried a search for "inbreeding", restricting it to article title by checking a box, and to Reviews by choosing from a scrolling box. This got me 14 hits, one of which was Pusey and Wolf 1996; the others all look pretty interesting too.
- the abstract
- keywords, as supplied by the authors, PLUS some added by ISI
- 33 cited references
- 5 citers (one of which is clearly a review article, from Trends in Ecology and Evolution
I'm so amazed by what this led to that I'll spin it out further.The Pusey and Wolf 1996So it looks like ISI's Web of Science is the answer to a maiden's prayer: its coverage is gigantic and offers the added dimension of bibliographic linkage of two powerful sorts, forward and backward. As you might imagine, this product is very expensive, but to my eye it seems uniquely valuable. I've written my letter to Santa Claus.One of the 59 cited (Charlesworth and Charlesworth 1987) is from Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics (which we have in the library), and it cites 162 sources and is cited by 353. The record also gives me a link to 183 "related" documents. So what we see here is a goodly chunk of the literature on inbreeding avoidance, neatly contained in a few linked documents.
- cites 59 sources and
- is cited by 7 (i.e., these 7 carry on the same work)