- 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.
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.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 -
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
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
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!
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.
Step 1: Identify specific articles of interest using the article database directions above.
Step 2:
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.