Essay / briefing paper assistance for Biology 1: Organisms.

Contents

• Topic / question guides
• Get up to speed before you start....
  • What's a journal article?
• Help and advice

Topic / question guides

Having trouble locating quality information for your essay or briefing paper? Take a look at the 'cheatsheets' for hints and advice.

Essay topics

1. Humans are the only organisms that prepare food by cooking...
2. Are fires a threat to native vegetation in South-eastern Australia
3. More than 60 species of Australian birds have evolved cooperate breeding...
4. How important are odours in maintaining social order...
5. Insects are considered to be the most diverse group of multi-cellular eukaryotes, and the parasitic wasps...
6. Obesity is reported to cause health problems in humans....

Briefing papers

1. Regulated deficit irrigation and partial root drying have been significant advances in the...
2. Medical researchers often use mice...
3. The human influenza virus has caused...
4. Ecosystem services can be defined as all of the natural processes and conditions..

Before you start

You can't write a good essay, or briefing paper, without finding quality information! To get started  you will need to work out:

What types of information should I use?

Now that you're at University, the expectations for how you research information, and the sources you use, are somewhat different. The big two sources of academic / scholarly information are:

• Books (although in the Sciences they are generally not considered primary sources of information)
  
• Journal articles

Journals and journal articles

A lot of the information that you will need will be found in Journals. A journal is a publication in which new issues are published regularly. Each issue contains a new set of articles on topics of interest to the reader or researcher.

Within a journal there can be several different types of information, including journal articles, book reviews and letters to the editor. Journal articles can contain a variety of different types of information, but often focus on:

• The processes, findings and interpretation of a piece of research
• A summary of the research on a given topic or in a given area
• A re-interpretation or analysis of an issue, event or concept.

Types of journals
The academic or scholarly "gold standard" is the peer reviewed or refereed journal. Articles in these journals have been scrutinised by experts in that field before they are published in the journal. This helps to ensure that the research and/or article is of high quality.

As part of the peer or expert review process, some articles are sent back to the authors for amendments before they are published, while other articles are rejected. An example of a peer reviewed Journal is Nature Geoscience.

Want to know more? Watch a short video on scholarly Vs popular journals (from Vanderbuilt University, requires flash. 3.12m).

Where to search for journal articles on a given subject
There are several ways to search for journal articles on a specific subject. You can search:

• Using Summon.
• Using a database. 
• Using internet searches, such as Google Scholar

Summon lets you search many of the journals (and books) available in the library. It is the best starting point for finding journal articles. When using Summon you can use the option to 'Limit to articles from scholarly publications, including peer-review'.

>> Watch a short Summon introductory video.

If you're looking to take it futher - and use a more sophisticated approach to searching - you can search for journal articles using one of the Library databases. A database is a searchable collection of references to articles published in journals, which generally links to (or sometimes includes) the full-text article.

The Library has a large number of databases. An important thing to remember is that each database has its own specialty area (or areas) and will have different coverage to every other database (so if you're not finding what you need you should try a different database). See the individual essay/briefing paper guides for recommended databases.

To give you an idea of just how many journal article references are in a database, and how many Journals you can search across in one go: Scopus includes article references from over 15,400 peer-reviewed journals. A search in Scopus will take in over 37 million article references.

The internet

The internet is a fantastic source of information. But it is also a fantastic source of disinformation. When searching the web you have to take a lot of care when determining whether the information or the source of the information is credible, and whether it is of a high enough standard for inclusion in your essay. You'll often get better results, for less time and effort, if you use Summon or search a library database.

>> Visit the Internet Detective (UK based, Intute Virtual Training Suite) to find out more on evaluating what you find on the web. You'll may also be surprised to discover just how much trouble you can get yourself into if you don't critically think about, and evaluate the information you find on the web. If you're going to use the web, make sure you use it smartly!