BIO103 - Unit Guide

ASFA: Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts indexes resources on fisheries, aquaculture, biological and ecological aspects of marine, freshwater and brackish environments, including their conservation, and socio-economic and legal aspects. Oceanic Abstracts, which focuses on marine and brackish-water environments, including marine biology and physical oceanography, fisheries, aquaculture, non-living resources, meteorology and geology, is included.

Searching ASFA 

Search for (morphology or structure or form) and (abalone or ormer) using the Advanced Search function.

1. At the Advanced Search, the default search is Anywhere. The total number of results is more than 3,000.
2. To refine your search, select the "Modify Search" button at the top right of the screen. Then:
3. Select the "Document title - TITLE field". Notice the change in the number of results from over 3,000 to around 90.

By default, the results list includes all kinds of sources such as scholarly journals, books, conference papers and reports. To further refine your search:

1. Limit to Peer reviewed scholarly articles by selecting the "Peer Reviewed" option in the left sidebar of the page. This will give you articles that have been evaluated by experts on the topic. Notice the total number is further decreased from approximately 90 to approximately 65.

Note: There is some distinction among articles known as scholarly, peer reviewed or refereed (another term meaning the same as peer reviewed).
Peer reviewed or refereed journals are all scholarly but not all scholarly articles are peer reviewed or refereed. The significance of this difference will become clearer as you progress with your research.

Other Functions within ASFA

• Default sort is "Most recent first". If you want to see the most relevant literature, you will need to sort by "Relevance".
• Use the "Full text - PDF" links for direct access to full text and the "Findit@ Murdoch" button or "Access full text" link to access subscribed full text articles.
• To save, email or cite any of the articles in your results lists, use the icons at the top right of the results screen.
• Citation is made easier by simply clicking on "Cite". This would be useful only after you have a result list.
  1. Mark the reference(s) with a tick
  2. Click on the Cite symbol
  3. Select the referencing style
  4. Click on change to select your referencing style
  5. Copy and paste the selected references into your assignment.

Note: Remember to check this information with the Referencing guides to ensure that all of the details are correct. You may have to edit the citations provided.

ASFA offers multiple editions for some referencing styles - always choose the most recent edition. For example, Chicago 17th edition (Author-Date system) or APA 7th edition.

BIOSIS Citation Index is the largest database of life sciences publications (half a million records are added each year) and covers journals, conference proceedings, book reviews and review articles from the life sciences. Coverage is from 1926 onwards. It is available via the Web of Science platform. Using the Search In menu, you will see a number of other databases available via this platform; for example: CABI: CAB Abstracts, Web of Science Core Collection, Current Contents Connect, etc. Only BIOSIS Citation Index will be discussed here.

Searching BIOSIS

1. Under the "Search in" dropdown menu, select BIOSIS Citation Index
2. In the search box, enter the search string "gymnobelideus leadbeateri" OR "leadbeaters possum". Placinging each term within inverted commas will search for the two words together rather than individually. Note: Although the taxonomic name for the leadbeater's possum is styled as Gymnobelideus leadbeateri, with italics, it is not necessary to include the italic formatting when searching. 
3. Leave the search option as "Topic" for now. This is the default option and will search the title, abstract and special indexing fields. You can also search by Major Concepts (which will search for broad subject areas such as ecology, metabolism or nutrition), Author, Publication title etc. if you wish. 
4. In the results screen, you will find more than 120 entries. Scroll through the results to find Smith’s paper on "Diet of Leadbeaters possum". Click on the title to go to the article entry.
5. "Citations" in the upper right of the page is the number of other articles that have referred in their reference lists to the article that you are viewing. You can view these articles by clicking the purple "citation" number. This may be used to find additional information relating to your research topic. Note: There may be differences in Times Cited for the same record. In this case, ~27 citations are from journals indexed by BIOSIS Citation Index, and ~56 are from all journals indexed by any of the Web of Science Core Collection databases.

Taxonomic Data: Note that BIOSIS Citation Index provides a detailed taxonomic data table for each record. 

Other functions within BIOSIS

From the results screen you can:

• Refine your results by using "Refine Results" on the left of the screen. Options for refining include Publication Year, Document Type, Major Concept, Author, and many more. 
• Export relevant records. This can be used to export your results into a reference manager such as EndNote, or to email or save results so you can access them later.
• Use "View your search history" (the clock face in the menu sidebar to the left of the Refine Results sidebar) to see the searches that you have run. From there you can combine search statements or delete them using the options on the right of the screen.
• Once you have determined that the records are relevant, you can then Save your search History. You will need to register to create an account to save your search history.

Scopus indexes resources in life sciences, health sciences, physical sciences and social sciences & humanities. It has particularly good coverage of the biological sciences, earth and environmental sciences, chemistry, physics and mathematics. Coverage is from 2004 onwards.

Searching Scopus

1. Search for: "gymnobelideus leadbeateri" OR "leadbeaters possum". Note the default search field is "Article title, Abstract, Keywords". Tip: you will usually get more relevant search results in a database by searching within Title/Abstract/Keywords, as these fields are focused on your topic. Searching within, for example, "All fields" in Scopus is likely to return too many irrelevant results as the full text of the documents will be searched for your keywords, producing broadened search results.
2. The results screen will display your results, along with the Refine Results left sidebar. This is similar to the results screen found in ASFA and Biosis, and can be used in a similar way.
3. An additional resource available in some databases, including Scopus and Biosis, is how to analyse results. This function in Scopus is found on the right hand side directly above your search results.

Analyze search results function in Scopus:

This function allows you to:

1. Find out the titles of journals that contain articles on your topic.
2. Find out the names of the authors who currently publish the most articles on your topic.
3. Find out the names of institutions that publish articles on your topic.
4. Find out the country that leads the research for your topic.

This information can help your understanding of the topic and provide additional resources to explore.

To test your knowledge of the library resources discussed in Exercise 4 Databases, please go to Quiz 4 - Databases on the Quizzes page.