COMD 6361

Welcome to Your Library BCHS 4311

Class Objectives

1. Able to understand and navigate Library’s web site and locate research databases.

2. Understand what Peer Reviewed articles are and know how to locate them.

3. Able to distinguish between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.

4. Establish a RefWorks user account and be able to import 3 sources from two different databases.

5. Understand how to formulate a computer database search.

6. Understand the value “Citation Searching” and be able to conduct one.

Quick Tour of Services

Your Library

• 2 million volumes

• 15,000 serials

• 250 databases

• 36 individual group study rooms

• 3 Branch Libraries• Arch/Art

• Music

• Optometry

Services• Remote access– CougarNet account• Full text Journal articles• Cougar One Card• Cougar-net account• VPN account• Inter Library Loan [online]• Library Provides 500 free pages of prints• IT Central Site also 500 free prints (Library Basement –

own entrance)• Free Photocopying or you can email or save on a flash

drive

Locating Books/Journals

• OneSearch & Catalog • Books, E-books • All types of media• Theses, Dissertations

• Databases• Articles in scholarly journals• Patents, Technical Reports,

Peer Review

Peer Reviewed Articles

• Stated in preface pages of the Journal

• Contains list of cited references

• Many databases provide a “peer review” or “scholarly Journal” filtering option

• Can check in Ulrich’s database–uses “refereed “

• Popular works, such as magazine and newspaper articles, are written for the general public– and are not Peer Reviewed. Not Wikipedia

Other experts in the field reads and reviews the article to assess professional merit

Types of Research Literature

How to Distinguish Between

Primary

• Secondary

• Tertiary

• Literature

Primary Sources

• Source material that is closest to the original research. Grants & external funding are a big help

• A source with direct personal knowledge of the events being described. It serves as an original source of information about the topic. A person with direct knowledge of a situation, or a document created by such a person.

• E.G. Case Reports, Clinical Trials, Original reporting articles…1st person

Secondary Sources

• Cite, comment on, or build upon primary sources.

• Involve generalization, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, or evaluation of the original information. If an article discusses old documents to derive a new conclusion, it is considered to be a primary source for the new conclusion

• E.G. Review Articles, meta-analysis [most peer review articles report new findings and thus are considered primary resources]

Tertiary Sources

• More peripheral

• Bibliographies, library catalogs, directories, reading lists and survey articles.

• Compilation of data…E.G. Red Book, PDR, Martindale Extra Pharmacopeia

• Longer lead time in publishing..years rather than months

Boolean Searching

Think Boolean

Drug Resistan*or

1700

3000

Drug Resistant Organisms—especially Malaria and Tuberculosis and in India, Asia or Africa

MalariaIndia

Asia

or

Tuberculosisor

Mycobacterium Africa

2600

or

When Formulating Your Database Search on a Topic

Think Boolean

12

Drug Resistant Organisms—especially Malaria and Tuberculosis and in India, Asia or Africa

Drug Resistan*

Malaria or Tuberculosis Or Mycobacterium

India or Asia

Or Africa

Citation Searching

Citation Searching

e.g. Drug-resistant malaria by Hyde JE in TRENDS IN PARASITOLOGY   Volume: 21   Issue: 11   Pages: 494- 498   Published: NOV 2005

– If we look up the list of references at the end of Hyde’s article they may be useful --but the problem is that they will all be older than 2005….. And I want current articles on the topic?

– So I can look for articles since 1985 who “cited” Hyde’s article by doing a “citation search”

– And we find the latest article was published in Nov 2011

Assumed subject relevancy between the original paper and the references that paper cites

Traditional Search Citation Search

1984

1984

Citation Searching

1980

19751970

2011

1963

2010

1998

2010

2008

Navigating UH LibraryWeb Pages

BCHS Biochemistry Library Class Guide

Questions?