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Anatomy & Physiology: Sweet

Objective.
The Literature Cited portion of section of your paper is your chance to prove that you can find three appropriate articles either approving your disproving your ideas. 

Background Information.
Before you start finding articles, it's a good idea to orient yourself by getting background information on your topic. For example, if my topic is on side effects of cold medicine, I may want to get information on cold medicine in general. Getting this basic information will help you understand many terms that may be referenced (but not explained) in a peer-reviewed article. In addition, they can help you identify important keywords or search terms to enter when searching for articles in the library's periodical databases. (For example, "antihistamines" might be the best term to use when searching for articles about cold medicine.) The following resources are excellent sources of background information:
  • Access Science is an online science encyclopedia. It contains detailed reference articles on all fundamental areas of science, and often includes illustrations and animations. In addition, many reference articles contain a bibliography that lists books and peer-reviewed articles. The print version is available as the McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology ( Q121 .M3 2007).
  • The Gale Virtual Reference Library contains reference articles from a variety of subject-specific encyclopedias, including the  the Gale Encyclopedia of Science.
Finding Articles.
Once you've found some relevant reference articles and have identified important keywords, you can begin your search in the library's periodical databases. You can access these at the library's periodicals databases page.  The library has two main databases:
  • Academic Search Complete contains millions of articles from thousands of periodicals, including academic, peer-reviewed journals. Also try CINHAHL, the nursing database also provided by EBSCOHost.  Tips for finding scholarly articles can be found here. 
  • ProQuest's Research Library also contains millions of articles from thousands of periodicals, but the emphasis is on newspapers rather than academic journals. Still, it is worth using. Tips for finding scholarly journals in ProQuest can be found here.
  • The Health & Wellness Resource Center and PubMed are periodical databases that specifically deal with health and medicine. PubMed Central is the full-text portion of PubMed.
  • PLoS Biology is an open-access portal for peer-reviewed journals in biology through the Public Library of Science. These are freely available on the web.
Use the Advanced Search feature to ensure you include both concepts in your topic.  Try entering terms for each concept in a different box, and notice the subject terms that appear on the left of the screen as you search.  Use these suggested subject terms and in the second column of boxes, choose "Subject Terms" to ensure you bring back articles truly about your topic.


Finding an article on the Internet. There are a few sources for finding scientific articles on the "free web" (as opposed to the periodical databases, which are not part of the free web). They can be somewhat limited, since many articles are not full-text or are from esoteric journals from other countries. However, they are worth a look. They include:
Evaluating
If your article comes from anywhere besides a scholarly journal, and especially if it comes from the "free web," you will need to spend time evaluating it for quality.  Ask yourself and then investigate:
 
    Who is the author? Does he/she have credentials in the field?
    Who published or sponsored it? 
    Coverage?  Is it relevant to your topic?  Does it have enough depth and detail to be valuable?
    Objectivity?  Is it biased in any way?  Does it have a purpose beyond informing the audience?
   
Interlibrary Loan (ILL). You may find an article that is not available full-text. In that case, we can order the article for from another educational institution you through our ILL program. All you have to do is print out the article information from the database (making sure the name of the article and name and date of the publication are included) and take it to the circulation desk. Articles generally take about a week to arrive, so be sure to take care of it early!

How to read a peer-reviewed journal article.
If you found a scientific article, you might need some help reading it. Scientific articles are often complicated and contain technical jargon and complex data in the form of charts, graphs and tables, they can be intimidating. This webpage on How to Read a Scientific Paper from the University of Arizona does an excellent job of breaking down the sections of a scientific article.

Citing sources
You need to list your three sources in some format, and APA is a good format to use.  Here's a link to our APA handout.  Find more help with citation on our  Citing Sources page.