This week we'll concentrate on ways to find out more about topics --on the range of sorts of sources, particularly in the tertiary and quaternary literatures which are especially useful in the early stages of exploration, when you're trying to gather background and understand why something makes an interesting question.

We'll look at

Tertiary and quaternary literatures are aimed at wider publics --at non-specialist audiences-- and emphasize explanation using language that goes beyond the code of narrow specialties. Tertiary and quaternary are especially useful in the early stages of exploring a subject.

All of these levels are important resources for a student of a subject, and (1) finding and (2) evaluating appropriate and useful sources will occupy a lot of our time.

Here's an example from Lexis-Nexis (and some general indexes) of worthwhile tertiary/quaternary sources for one topic ('gorilla communication'), and some of what it led to. And here are some Thursday examples, along similar lines.

You can find links to these general purpose article databases --Periodical Abstracts Online (PAO) and Expanded Academic Index (EAI) as well as Lexis-Nexis-- via

      Library Gateway ==> Research Resources ==> Periodical Indexes

These databases do include a good many scientific sources, but they're essentially places to begin a search.

Some subjects are very current --in the news, and under very active investigation. For these the research literature is often too slow, and it's necessary to consider the news media of science, including the weekly journals Science and Nature.

And some subjects are so much in the news that the problem is finding what's really useful without drowning in inessentials. BSE ('Mad Cow Disease') is a ready example of that. You should be aware of BioDigest as a resource for getting started with any topic, but it's especially useful in focusing a topic with "too much" information.

You can use BioDigest in 3 forms:

All three versions allow you to e-mail the summary articles to yourself.

Here are a couple of articles on BSE from BioDigest.

A request from Dr. Russell that I keep an eye open for materials on telomeres and telomerase gave me an opportunity to run through the whole search sequence with another subject.
You need to read a lot of stuff, and use the information you find to refine your searches --adding more precise terminology, using the names of researchers who seem to turn up frequently.

As I look over the topics people have chosen I realize that a lot of relevant literature is not available at W&L --we don't have the medical journals that your searches in specialized databases will lead you to, and our coverage for the animals chosen by those in Dr. Nye's group is spotty. This means that (for many people) it'll be necessary for you to use InterLibrary Loan for some materials, but I'd like to exercise some control over that (to lighten the load on Mrs. Brittigan, who does the ILL transactions) by limiting you to a maximum of 4 ILL requests for the course. This means that they'll need to be carefully selected, making use of abstracts and other available information that indicates that they are the right sources.

I suggest that anybody who needs book resources by ILL should submit a request before the February break, so that there's some chance the material will be available when you return.