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BIOL 486 - Marine Communities (Taniguchi)

This guide will help you find the resources you need to complete your Marine Ecosystem Write Up for Dr. Taniguchi's Marine Communities course.

Scholarly Sources

How can you tell if an article is "peer-reviewed", or "scholarly"?

Watch the video below to learn how to figure out whether the source you found is a "peer-reviewed" article.

Identify a Peer-Reviewed Article by USC Libraries

The databases below will have the best information for ecology-related topics:

Database Disciplinary Coverage
Biological Abstracts Life sciences, ranging from botany to microbio to pharmacology
BioOne Biological, ecological, and environmental sciences
Academic Search Premier Multi-disciplinary literature
Google Scholar @ CSUSM Multi-disciplinary literature
ScienceDirect Multi-disciplinary literature, mainly in the sciences and medical fields, limited to Elsevier published research (Note: make sure you don't *only* search ScienceDirect, since you will only find research published by a single publishing company)

 

Tips Examples
Use keywords, not long search phrases

Instead of searching for "What is the impact of wetland restoration on animals in the Florida Everglades?" break down your search into the main keywords:

Florida Everglades, wetlands, restoration, animals

To get more focused results:

Use quotation marks (" ") to keep phrases together

Use AND to combine different keywords

 "Florida Everglades" AND restoration

To get broader results:

Use OR to combine similar/associated keywords

Truncate words that have a variety of endings with a *

("Florida Everglades" OR wetlands) AND restoration AND animal*

 

animal* includes animal and also animals
Look for ways to limit your search in the database

You can often limit by type of article (scholarly and peer-reviewed) & year of publication

(remember - for this assignment you need at least two modern articles published after 2000)
Subjects: Biology