first year seminar: evolution in everyday life

Locating Background Material:

Specialized encyclopedias give overviews of topics from the perspective of the discipline they cover. They can provide definitions for unfamiliar terms, and leads on the identities of accepted experts and the titles of some books or articles they have authored.

Electronic Resource	Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (Wiley)
Reference 573.2 C178c	The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, 1992.
Reference 573.203 M659e	Encyclopedia of Evolution, 1990. (Milner)
Reference 576.803 E56e	Encyclopedia of Evolution, 2002. (Pagel)

Searching Databases for Journal Citations on a Topic:

From the Library home page, choose Research, then Online Resources to access lists of subscription databases.

Under Indexes and Databases, choose the dropdown menu for Sciences and select Biology. The resulting list is divided into Introductory, Core and Specialized. Three of the Core databases may be the most helpful for the assignments in this course.

Biological Abstracts--a huge database covering 3700 journals in the life sciences that includes citations, abstracts, and some full text links, from 1995.
BioOne is a small aggregation of bioscience journals, including the journal, Evolution.
ISI Science Citations Index indexes 5900 of the top 15% of science journals in more than 150 areas of science.

Access Research Help to find the numerous Database Guides, Course Guides (including this guide!), and Subject Guides for extra help using our databases, and using our resources for a specific course or subject.

Finding the Journals that Contain the Citations You Found:

Sometimes accessing full text of an article will be a few easy clicks from the database in which you found the citation. Click on a link or . If that does not produce full text, then use the information in the citation (journal title, year, volume, issue, page, article title) and follow the steps below in order until you find what you need:

Enter the journal title into the Full Text Electronic Journals Holdings list (dropping the initial article, if any). If we have electronic full text access, click the links until you find the volume, issue, and page number you need.
If there is no electronic access to the full text of the article, check the Drew Library Catalog. Use the browse function, enter the journal title (dropping the initial article, if any), and choose Periodical Title for the search. If we have the journal, scroll to the bottom of the record to determine the time range format and location of our holdings.
If you still have not found the journal article you need, request the article through Interlibrary Loan for a small fee. This can take up to four weeks, so it requires planning ahead. Scroll down the Interlibrary Loan Form page to find the form for periodicals requests.

Locating Books:

Use the online Library Catalog. Keyword searches for a word in the entire record. (For example, a keyword search for evolution turns up 3,017 records. A Browse search for evolution as a subject turns up 538 records, and a list of more specialized subjects such as Molecular evolution (20 records) and Evolution (Biology) (96 records)if you click on the links. If you know the title (Panda's Thumb ) or author (Gould, Stephen Jay ) of a work, use the Browse feature.

Websites:

Understanding Evolution from University of California Museum of Paleontology, includes information on evolution around us.
Darwin Digital Library of Evolution, from theAmerican Museum of Natural History offers online access to the 1859, Murray edition of On the Origin of Species, other manuscripts, photos of Darwin's plants, and a bibliography.

Questions?

Contact Cathy Ryan, x3483.
Stop by at the reference desk 9-5 weekdays, and 6-10 pm Sunday-Thursday.
Check out the Ask a Librarian link on many of our library web pages.

Last updated 10/06/2006 by Cathy Ryan