Finding Information in the Life Sciences
The main aim of Biology 182 is to help you develop skills useful in
conducting research in new topics in Biology and related disciplines. We
mean to give you a clear idea of
the range of relevant literatures, provide you with the tools to
search various databases and collections of resources, and help
you develop skills for evaluating what you find. Please note a
series of steps:
- explore general literature (including science journalism and
the
World Wide Web) to develop a general orientation and understand the basic
vocabulary of the topic;
- find books relevant to the topic at W&L (and explore
them!) and in online catalogs at larger libraries;
- locate and read review articles which summarize research in
and around the assigned topic;
- find, read and write annotations on primary research
articles on the
assigned topic or some limited subpart (which you will define in
consultation with your faculty supervisor).
Each passing year broadens the range and power of electronic
resources,
and makes it ever more necessary to develop means to screen and sort the
information you retrieve. It is tempting to rely entirely upon
electronic sources, but absolutely necessary to learn to use the
print-on-paper sources (especially those which make up the primary
literature) that lie behind and at the foundation of the
electronic materials. Accordingly, we force you through exercises that
will send you to various locations in libraries, at W&L and
elsewhere. The exercises are supposed to help you work on your specific
assigned topic, but they are only the beginning of what you should
be doing as you explore the topic. You should consult your faculty
supervisor about his/her specific expectations and desires beyond the
four assignments.
Do not hesitate to ask me for help with technical and conceptual
parts of the course. I can't claim expertise with the substantive side
of all assigned topics, and in some cases what you need to know is in the
hands of the Biology faculty, but I'll be glad to help in any way I can.
Often a momentary confusion can be dispelled in a few minutes of hands-on
consultation --note especially that I'm in my office in the Sceince
Library on Monday and Tuesday evenings from about 6:30 to 9 or so.
Where to begin?
Generally one starts with a term or a topic or a concept --something
assigned to you, or encountered in reading, or mentioned by someone as
significant or relevant. The first task is to get some
preliminary idea of what realm the term, topic or concept belongs
to, and then to start gathering information which may turn out to be
relevant to an evolving understanding of its meaning, significance, and
relationships with other subjects and topics.
This process of
gathering is most effective if it is orderly, but everyone
has to work out for him/herself personal strategies for keeping track
--for making notes and recording the sequence of discoveries and
dead ends. Keeping some sort of research log (whether in a separate
book, as a series of dated pages, or according to some other accumulation
scheme) is almost certain to pay off in the end; but you'll only learn
what works for you by trial and error.
In any case, a lot of what you'll do in investigating a new topic centers
on gathering and mapping terminology --making sense out
of the words used in articles, and gradually learning enough of meanings
and relationships to understand discourse and eventually to join the
'conversations' in professional literature.
If the topic, subject or term is completely unknown to you it's probably
best to start with the most general tools and seek definitions and broad
explanations, especially to develop a sense of (a) what the term is a
subpart of, and (b) what the term's subparts are:
Keyword searches in electronic databases can also be useful starting
places, though they may not offer basic definitions. If you already know
the basics (viz., you know that Pseudomonas is a bacterium) it may make
more sense to begin with keyword searches in several different databases.
No single source contains everything you need;
every
search teaches you something
Among the sources to use in the early (exploratory) stages of research:
- ANNIE
--books at W&L, useful subject headings
- Other library catalogs
--books in larger libraries
- Periodical Abstracts Online (PAO)
--magazine and journal articles, some at W&L
- Expanded Academic Index (EAI)
--overlap with PAO, some full text, some extensive abstracts
- BioDigest via FirstSearch
--brief explanatory articles on many subjects
- Lexis-Nexis
--the NEWS library: news reports, including science journalism (also
includes a number of general science publications: Natural
History, New Scientist, Science, Science News)
- AltaVista
and other WWW indexes
--appearance of terms in WWW documents
Once you are familiar with terminology and concepts surrounding your
subject, it makes sense to explore the secondary literature of review
articles and then the primary literature in which research is reported.
Your eventual goal is to comprehend the work being done at the cutting
edge of research, but this always requires clear understanding of
the background and intellectual history of the field you aspire to work
in. Such an understanding has to be based in extensive reading:
you will need to examine many sources, decide that some are and others
are not relevant, and read and write and think.
Important resources for exploration of secondary and primary literature
include
- Annual Review articles and other summaries of state-of-the-art
- FirstSearch databases, including
- BIOSIS
- AGRICOLA
- MEDLINE (also accessible via Lexis/Nexis)
- UnCover (a vast database of journal tables of contents)
Over the next few weeks we'll explore the tools and resources sketched
above. Other databases will be available to you in the future; it's easy
enough to learn to use new ones once you understand what they are and how they
work.
Another facet of the course is concerned with productive and efficient
use of the software tools available at W&L, including the World
Wide Web, e-mail,
telnet and ftp (File Transfer Protocol). The effort invested in becoming
adept with these resources will pay back throughout your careers, as you
need to learn new tools. We'll concentrate on the Macintosh interface,
but pretty much everything is equally possible (sometimes with slight
differences) in the Windows world. Help is
available if you consider yourself "computer-illiterate".
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