MB 302: General Microbiology
- Librarian: Hannah Rempel
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Phone - (541)737-9902
Email - hannah.rempel@oregonstate.edu
Contact me with any questions, or if you have problems finding articles or other resources for this class.
There are two parts to creating successful citations - 1) deciding what information to reference, and 2) recording the citation in an acceptable format.
1)To avoid plagiarizing and successfully include the best information from what you read, check out these tips:
2)To successfully cite the articles, books or lectures that you refer to in your lab report in the correct format, use the following resources:
CBE Citing within the text of your lab report
CBE Citations in the References section of your lab report
The following websites give some tips on how to read scientific journal articles:
My brief advice for reading journal articles is to keep a pen handy to write notes to yourself in the margins, and always write a summary of what you learned from the paper at the top of the paper or on a post-it note immediately after you finish reading the paper.
To search for a topic you will need to use an article database (not the ejournals list - more about using ejournals below).
Find a good database. Each database focuses on a particular subject.- If you know the name of a good database for your project already, use the alphabet key on the databases page to navigate to your database.
- If you don't know the database name, use the subject pull down menu at the top of the databases page to choose your subject area. I would suggest "biological sciences." The right hand column lists a variety of biology-related (including microbiology) databases. Click on the red I to get more information about each database.
- (Microbiology database suggestions below).
Break your topic down. Article databases often work best when you put a single idea in each search box. For example, the research topic "finding Burkholderia cepacia complex in soil environments" could be broken down into three main ideas - Burkholderia cepacia, soil environments, and detection. Each of these ideas would go in their own search box or be separated by "and."
Find the article. Not all databases have full-text articles, and sometimes we have the article available electronically, but it is not immediately available from the database with one click. If you do not see a PDF icon for the article within the database, you have 3 options -
- you can click on the "get this item" button which will help you discover whether or not our library has the article,
- copy the name of the journal title, open another tab or window to the library's homepage, click on the ejournals link and paste the name of the journal in the search box, once you have opened the journal, find the right volume, issue and page number for your article,
- if the journal title is not in the ejournals list, paste the title into the library's catalog (use the title search) to see if we have it (either electronically or in print).
MEDLINE - topics covered include clinical and experimental medicine; microbiology; pathology; pharmacology; physiology; reproductive biology; toxicology; and veterinary medicine (virtually identical to PubMed).
Biological Abstracts/BIOSIS - topics focus on biology, including biochemistry, endocrinology, genetics, microbiology, molecular and cellular biology, and physiology.
Web of Science - topics include all science disciplines, includes cited reference searching
Subscription Databases
From the "databases" link on the library's webpage , you can use several powerful databases to search thousands of magazines and newspapers at once.
Here are a few I recommend:
Lexis-Nexis is an extremely powerful tool that searches local, national, international and specialized news sources (both print and broadcast). All of the articles are available online, and this database is updated daily.
Searches 25 national and international newspapers, 260 regional papers as well as broadcast news sources. Many of the articles are available online, and this database is updated daily.
Newspaper Websites
TIP: If you find something on one of these websites that is not available for free, check to see if the OSU Libraries has it (through the ejournals list) before paying for access elsewhere!
Step 1: Identify specific articles of interest using the article database directions above.
Step 2:
- Click on the E-Journals list to see if the journal you need is available online (use the link above or go to ejournals in the center of the library's homepage under "quicklinks."
- Enter the journal title (not the article title) in the search box at the top of the page.
- If you get multiple results, choose the journal listing that has the date range that includes the time frame when your article was published.
- Click on the blue publisher's link to get to the ejournal.
- Navigate to the correct volume, issue and page number for your article by using either the date links, the previous issues link, or the volume links (each ejournal interface looks a little different).
Step 3: If the journal is not online, find the call number for the journal(s) in which the article is found. (Use the library catalog for this step.) Find the article in the library and make a photocopy.
