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:

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:

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

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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