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

  1. Start an internet browser (USE MODZILLA/FIREFOX when in lab because IE will not allow you to open PDFs).
  2. 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/
  3. Click on Articles tab -->Browse by Database Title is where you will start.
  4. 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.
  5. Select B for databases starting with B and click on BioOne.
  6. You can search for papers by a particular author or by subject.  In the search box, enter the name ‘Nicholson’ (without the quotes) and see if you can find any papers from Dr. Nicholson’s swift fox 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’)
  7. Now click on the advanced search link just below the search box.
  8. Pick a string of keywords (e.g., ‘warbler’ and ‘population’) and enter them in the article or chapter 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?
  9. You can further refine your search by rearranging words and putting word strings in quotes or searching within specific journals from the list shown.  
  10. 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.
  11. 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 undesirable 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 Puma 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.
  12. Click on the full-text or PDF links to view the full text of articles that you have found.
  13. 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.
    1. It may behoove you to invest in a citation database manager like EndNote, RefWorks, ProCite, Zotero Mendelay etc.  With these you can organize, sort, search, classify, and reformat into any professional journal format at a click of a button.  You can download citations directly into these programs from any database like BioOne, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, Web of Science, JSTOR, PubMed,....etc.  Some of them you can store your citations on the web and therefore access them from anywhere in the world.
    2. University of Idaho gives you free access to Endnote Web or Zotero while you are a student. 
      1. http://www.lib.uidaho.edu/classes/instruction/workshops/ws2009_2010/EndnoteWebhandout.pdf
      2. http://www.lib.uidaho.edu/classes/instruction/workshops/ws2009_2010/Zotero.pdf
  14. Once you've created a page of citations (>10 papers) on topics (i.e., pick new words besides population and warblers) in which you are interested, format it a professional way (Suggestion: use JWM) and print it. Use the same format for all citations.  Hand it in for the first half of Part I of Exercise #1 (2 points).
  15. Download 1 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 that has the title and abstract for your document to hand in for the second half of Part I of Exercise #1 (2 points).  For this part Do not print off the page that has the BIOone logo, do not print off the search engine page with the abstract.  We want the first page of the actual paper.

II. Searching the fish and wildlife literature over the internet using Fish, Fisheries, and Aquatic Biodiversity Worldwide or Wildlife and Ecology Studies Worldwide

  1. Start an internet browser. (USE MODZILLA/FIREFOX when in lab because IE will not allow you to open PDFs)
  2. Go to the University of Idaho's library web site: http://www.lib.uidaho.edu/
  3. Under "2. Databases by Subject", select "Biology/Life Sciences" or "Wildlife".  Then select either Fish, Fisheries, and Aquatic Biodiversity Worldwide or Wildlife & Ecology Studies Worldwide.  
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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

  1. Start an internet browser.
  2. Select a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, etc.
  3. Enter the same search terms that you used in your successful searches in Parts I and II above.
  4. 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.
  5. 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?
  6. Print out 1 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).
  7. 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.
  8. Print 1 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.

Revised: 25 August 2011