Forrer Learning Commons Library Services: BIOL/ENVR 434 Wildlife Ecology and Management Class Guide: Searching in Databases

Search Tips

Once you find a database, here are some tips for searching it as efficiently as possible:

Look for ways to limit your results:

Unlike Google, you are not limited to just a keyword search. In most databases you can narrow down your results by:
- subject area,
- type of material (just peer-reviewed journal articles), or
- date published (this especially important in an area like wildlife ecology where information can become dated very quickly)
Explore the subject or thesaurus terms that are used by most databases. Since these are standardized, they allow you to find all the relevant information on a particular subject and weed out a lot of false hits.
Quotation marks will isolate that phrase: "natural selection" lists results containing only that specific phrase, but results for natural selection would contain natural AND selection somewhere, not necessarily side by side
Remember to use Boolean Operators to help make your search more efficient:
- AND will produce results that contain BOTH terms (e.g. birds AND bees)
- OR generates results that contain EITHER term (e.g. dogs OR canines)
- NOT results will include the first terms, but not the second (cats NOT musical)

ScienceDirect: Health & Life Sciences Journal Collection
*Highly recommended for this assignment*
Offers journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,500 peer-reviewed journals and more than 11,000 books. We subscribe to the Health Sciences and Life Sciences module.
PLOS (Public Library of Science)
An open-access science, technology and medicine publisher. They have several journals: PLOS ONE, PLOS Biology, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Genetics, PLOS Medicine, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLOS Pathogens. The link starts you at PLOS ONE advance search; the other journals are readily available under Publications.
Nature
Full text access to the prestigious journal Nature (online 1997 - present). Indexing access for the other journals from the Nature Publishing Group. Library has older issues in bound volumes, years: 1953 - 1968 and 1990 - 2003.
Science
Full text access (1997 to today) to Science Magazine, published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Wiley Online Library
*Highly recommended for this assignment*
While Wiley is an interdisciplinary journal, it includes a large suite of ecology journals, so it is especially recommended for this assignment.
Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 5,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 4,600 peer-reviewed journals.
JSTOR
JSTOR is the online archives of scholarly journals in most fields. Full text begins with the first issue of many journals and ends with issues 5-7 years old.
OMNIFILE/MEGA
Contains the full text of articles from over 2,500 publications, and indexing and abstracts from nearly 3,600 publications, providing support for research in all core undergraduate subjects and for cross-disciplinary work