WLF 448: Fish and Wildlife Population Ecology
Lab Notes 1, Fall 2010
Exercise #1 (Lab 1):
Searching Fish and Wildlife
Literature
We will be using various online databases to search the fish and wildlife
literature for published papers relating to the species selected for your
research paper. Many of these databases can be searched over the internet
through the University of Idaho's web site.
I. Searching specific journals or publishers of groups of journals
- Start an internet browser (e.g. Internet
Explorer).
- Enter the address of the University of Idaho's
library web portal to databases to which UI subscribes for our use:
http://www.lib.uidaho.edu/
- Click on ‘Find Articles’.
- The University of Idaho subscribes to dozens of
excellent databases of professional publications such as Web of Science
and BioOne, where you can search and read full-text articles published
in various fish, wildlife, and natural resource journals, including the
Journal of Wildlife Management, the Journal of the American
Benthological Society, Ecology, Bioscience,
Fisheries, The Southwestern Naturalist, etc. Other databases can be
used to search within specific groups of journals (e.g., OWL for a
combined database of North American and European Ornithology journals or
FFABW for searching within fisheries-related publications). In addition
to current articles, JSTOR contains archives of many older articles from
various fish, wildlife, and ecology journals.
- Select B for databases starting with B and
click on BioOne.
- You can search for papers by a particular author
or by subject. In the search box, enter the name ‘Horne’
(without the quotes) and see if you can find any papers from Dr. Horne’s
dissertation work. If you are not looking for publications by a
particular author, a more useful search might be to enter 1 or more
words describing the animal species and topic you are interested in
(e.g. ‘Chinook population’ or ‘elk harvest’)
- Now click on the advanced search link just
below the search box.
- Pick a string of keywords (e.g., ‘warbler’ and
‘population’) and enter them in the article title box. How many
hits do you get? Now enter the same string in the abstract box.
Are the same articles listed? Now enter the same words in the article
full text box. Before you hit the search button, what changes to
your search results do you anticipate?
- You can further refine your search by rearranging
words and putting word strings in quotes or searching within specific
journals from the list shown.
- After refining a search, you will be shown the
first 10-50 records of citations that may be relevant to your search.
Click on the abstract links to see if the citations contain the
type of information that you wanted.
- If the results did not include what you wanted or
there were too many hits go back and modify your search commands by
changing words, adding more specific terms, selecting only recent years,
etc. Some words can result in multiple
undesireable hits. For example, if you are looking for
information on mountain lions, you might try entering ‘mountain’ and
‘lion’ as search terms, which could result in articles about mountains,
lions, and mountain lions. If you instead use a synonym like
Felis
concolor, you will likely find articles only dealing with
mountain lions. Similarly, if your search resulted in too few hits, try
reducing the number of search terms or searching for other words or
synonyms.
- Click on the full-text or PDF links
to view the full text of articles that you have found.
- If you want to use some of the citations that you
found in your project you can highlight the citations and use CTRL-C to
copy them into a Word or WordPerfect file for later use. Create a small
file with some of your citations to hand in below.
- Once you've created a page of citations (>10
papers) in which you are interested, format it a professional way and
print it. Hand it in for the first half of Part I of Exercise #1 (2
points).
- Download the pdf file
(an electronic reprint that you read and print with Adobe Acrobat) of
one of the papers you found (from your citation list) and print the
first page to hand in for the second half of Part I of Exercise #1 (2
points).
II. Searching the fish and wildlife literature over the internet using
Fish, Fisheries, and Aquatic Biodiversity Worldwide or Wildlife
and Ecology Studies Worldwide
- Start an
internet browser.
- Go to the University of Idaho's library web site:
http://www.lib.uidaho.edu/
- Under "2. Databases by Subject", select
"Biology/Life Sciences". Then select either Fish,
Fisheries, and Aquatic Biodiversity Worldwide or Wildlife &
Ecology Studies Worldwide.
- Enter the same words you used for the BioOne
searches and select your search criteria. Notice that the criteria are
different from those available in BioOne. Do you find the
same number of papers or even the same papers compared to BioOne?
Briefly explain.
- Explore what happens when you choose different
search criteria such as ‘Find all my search terms’ versus ‘Find
any of my search terms’. Do you find the same number of
papers? Briefly explain.
- Address the 2 questions underlined above (steps 4
and 5) for Part II of Exercise #1 (4 points). Information regarding the
format of problem set write-ups can be found on the
lab introduction page.
III. Searching the World Wide Web (e.g., Google) for information on
wildlife and fish
- Start an
internet browser.
- Select a search engine such as Google, Yahoo,
Dogpile, etc.
- Enter the same search terms that you used in your
successful searches in Parts I and II above.
- Follow the links to the web sites found in your
search until you find one or two pages of useful information. If
necessary you may need to use different search terms or modify your
search in other ways until you find some useful information on the same
general topics. Try using ‘advanced search’ options where available.
- Does this sort of search provide the same
quality of information as the searches above for the professional
literature? How would you verify the quality and veracity of the
information found by these search engines?
- Print out 1-2 pages of the most useful information
and answer the underlined questions above (step 5) to hand in as the
first half of Part III of your Exercise #1 (2 points).
- Now go to Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com)
and enter the same search terms you’ve previously used. Google Scholar
offers an extremely wide search of scientific literature published in
refereed journals and has a neat aspect that consists of counts of
papers citing each paper found, as well as links to those papers that
cited the papers you found. Using those functions, you can quickly
identify how widely used a particular paper has been and find recent
papers on the same topic as an older, "classic" paper.
- Print 1-2 pages of the citations you found using
Google Scholar. Discuss how a search engine such as this might affect
our current library system. What, if any, are the drawbacks of a search
engine like Google Scholar? Hand this in as the second half of Part III
of Exercise #1 (2 points).
IV. Compare and contrast the results of the 3 types of searches
Compare and contrast the results of your searches above. Briefly
highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each type of search. Address
the following questions: What type of information would be found best by
each approach (3 points)? Some people say www stands for "wild, wild web"
because of the abuses that have been perpetrated on the public using it.
What are some criteria you would use for measuring the value of internet
information sources (5 points)? Think about grey literature versus
peer-reviewed literature. How recent are the data and/or papers? Who are
authors and what are their potential biases? Check the list of references
in a paper (e.g., mostly peer-reviewed, grey literature, or
magazine/newspaper articles). Who would you ask about the value of an
information source? Which of these types of information are citable in a
scientific paper (such as your term paper for this class)? When, if ever,
is it acceptable to cite a web page? For Part IV of Exercise #1, write up
and hand in your responses to the questions in the format described on the
lab introduction page for problem sets.