Authors of original unit: Raboin, Regina F. the Tsich library and the Department of Biology at Tufts University.

Authors of spin-off: Gloria Rendon, Melody Allison, Chirag Kenia, Johnny Tenegra, Ann Chen

Partner Projects: Biology Student Workbench, UIUC Biology Library

Grade Level: Freshman and up

Unit Keywords: Biology literature research,  scientific literature search-retrieval-evaluation-summary,  query writing

This unit is for helping life sciences students develop literature research skills. Here you will get structured help finding and using library information sources for biology.  Additionally, an illustrative example will be used through all the steps of this process.Library research skills are critical to the practicing biologist. Whether designing  experiments for wet labs or silico labs, or for writing a paper, an in-depth knowledge of previous work is required. Efforts such as the Digital Library project, the Entrez system at the National Library of Medicine,  and the Google Book Search Library project in the US highlight the current trend towards using digital media  to store scientific literature. Along with the change in format to store information; there has to be a change in the way such information is searched and retrieved. In this unit, we want to address some of the issues that arise during search and retrieval of scientific literature in the digital age.

Web browser (preferably Firefox), Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flashplayer, Realplayer, Shockwave, Javascript-enabled and JMol plugin. To find out which plugins are already installed on your mozilla/firefox browser, just type 'about:plugins' in address box. You can download each plug-in component from the links provided and you can test if your system support Javascript from here.

Introduction

Part 1:  Topic Selection  [download worksheet]

Part 2: Identify possible sources of information [download worksheet]

Part 3: Write queries  [download worksheet]

Part 4r: explore reference sources of information [source] [worksheet]

Part 4p: explore primary sources of information [source] [worksheet]

Part 4s: explore secondary sources of information [source] [worksheet]

Part 4w: explore web-based sources of information [source] [worksheet]

Part 5:  Retrieving results of search [download worksheet]

Part 6: Evaluating results  [download worksheet]

Part 7: summarizing and putting it together [overview] [summarizing guidelines] [writing paper guidelines] [guidelines for citing references] [worksheets]

Part 8: References, Additional Links, [Worksheets] [Handouts], [UIUC Biology Library Help]