Monday, September 20, 2010

Finding Primary Source Articles for Biology

Soon students will be coming in looking for primary source articles for biology. This basically means experiments. The best place to find these articles is: EBSCO Academic Search Premier, Gale Expanded Academic ASAP, or Gale's General Science Collection.

Use a keyword that describes what they are looking for and the keywords "Research" AND "Methods" AND "Results" and limit to "peer reviewed." Wait to limit to full-text until after you search, that way you get a sense of if there is a lot, or a little, available on a subject. If there isn't much, dig into what you get and see if the articles are available full-text in another database, or see if the student can wait a few days for an ILL.

Limiting to an article type doesn't work well. There isn't a specific article type for what we're looking for in these databases.

EBSCO's Science Reference Center is not a good source for this type of article. This database is geared more towards K-12 and has few research reports.

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