Biology essay 1: Many species of birds...

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Question:

"Many species of birds, e.g. white-winged choughs and kookaburras, have evolved cooperative breeding strategies. Otherwise 'fit' adults forgo the opportunity of passing on their genes in favour of 'helping' another breeding pair to raise their offspring. How can such a seemingly maladaptive behaviour evolve?"

*Some fine print before you start! This is just ONE interpretation of the question. You may interpret the question differently and/or identify different key concepts. This guide is simply designed to get you started!

Step 1: Identify the main 'concepts' or ideas within the question.

The most critical part of finding information on your essay topic is to carefully think about the topic you have been asked to write about.

The best way of doing this is to break the topic into individual ideas or concepts. This will help you to work out if there is any part of the question that you don't understand, and will give you a good starting point for working out how and where you are going to search for the information you need to answer the question.

Breaking down the question into its core elements (concepts, ideas or topics) involves identifying and getting rid of all the "filler words". It can often help to rephrase the question in your own words. 

For this essay, the key elements are*: 

Once you've identified the key elements, a good place to start is to look up the main concepts in an Encyclopedia or Dictionary. That way you gain better knowledge of the key concepts and additional keyword ideas (see below). The Encyclopaedia may even provide references to the sources of the information (and/or to related articles).  For example:

• The encyclopedia of ecology & environmental management: available online
  [link not working? Search the catalogue].

Step 2: Identify other keywords for each of the main concepts.

In 99% of cases, there are multiple ways of saying the same thing. This makes searching for information tricky, as you don't know which words an author will have used in their article (particularly in Ecology - e.g. has the author used the common name, or the scientific name?). To get around this, you need to brainstorm the different ways an author could have 'talked about' each of the main concepts. For example:

Your turn! What other keywords or terms can you think of? As you start finding information, and reading through it, you'll identify other keywords that you can then incorporate into your search.

Step 3: Combining the keywords

Now that you've identified a number of the ways an author could have talked about the different concepts or ideas that make up the essay question, the next step is to work out how you will use, or combine, those keywords when you start searching.

In general, you have two ways of combining keywords: using AND or using OR. In our table above, we have examples of different concepts (e.g. "birds" "cooperative breeding") and examples of different words, or terms, that are a variation of each other (e.g. "birds" "avian" "kookaburra"). When you start searching, you'll want to combine these differently.

• To find journal articles or books that talk about two or more different concepts, use AND:
  e.g. birds AND cooperative breeding
  Would be interpreted as: find me a journal article that discusses both birds and cooperative breeding.
   
• To find journal articles or books that talk about any variation of a concept, use OR:
  e.g. birds OR kookaburras
  Would be interpreted as: find me a journal article that talks about birds or kookaburras, I don't mind which!

AND and OR searching is useful when searching the Library catalogue for books, but is particularly useful when it comes to searching for journal articles. You can go from a simple search to a highly elaborate one very rapidly!

Confused?
Don't be. You probably do this already. If you want to see it in action, take a look at the Google Advanced search page. The option to find "all these words" is an AND search. If you type in birds cooperative breeding then Google will automatically add an AND in between your keywords (finding you websites that mention all three of your keywords). The one or more of these words: option is an OR search (you can actually see the ORs in between the search fields!). Try it and see the differences in the search results. 

Step 4: Searching for books

Now that you've identified the key concepts that you need to consider - and find information on - you can start thinking about where you're going to find that information. Using the key concepts (and their alternative terms) that you identified above, you can see that there are different types of books that may help you to answer the essay question. You may like to look for books on:

• cooperative breeding
• Bird mating or breeding (in general)
• Bird evolution, or evolutionary biology in general 
• Australian birds
• Kookaburras, White-winged choughs or on other species that using cooperative breeding
• Handbooks on Birds (detailed information on bird species and their characteristics, often including references to the sources they used)
• .....

Books are not generally considered primary sources (in the sciences), but they are often a good way to:

• Get familliar with a topic
• Point you in the direction of the primary research itself (ie: by looking at the book's bibliography, or a chapter reference list)

Keep in mind that you may not find a book on your exact topic (particularly if you leave your essay to the last minute and they're all out on loan!). You may need to think about finding a more general book, that may have a chapter or section that discusses your topic.

To find books in the University of Adelaide Library you will need to search the Library catalogue. If the book(s) that you need are out on loan, be sure to request them, or contact your Lecturer to ask them to have the book placed in the Reserve collection (which means it will be available to all students writing the essay, albeit on a short term loan).

Step 5: Finding journal articles

In a nutshell: to find journal articles you need to search a database (essentially a big collection of references to journal articles and other scholarly information) and each database has its own specialty area. See the main essay/briefing paper guide for more information on journals and journal articles.

Useful databases to search to find journal articles for this essay topic include:

 ... but there are a whole range of databases, including those focussing on Australian content. View a list of databases most relevant to Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Once you've identified which databases are likely to have information on your topic, you now need to go into the databases, and search using the keywords (and the AND and OR searching) that we looked at earlier.

Tip!

Save yourself some typing and use truncation when you search. Truncation is where you cut off a word at a certain point, and tell the database that you want it to search for all endings of the word. Generally you use an * (asterisk) to truncate, but different databases use different truncation symbols - check the 'help' pages if you're unsure.

For example, if you are looking for information relating to "Australia", but you're not sure whether the author will have used the term "Australia" or "Australians" or "Australian". Rather than typing out all of the different variations, you can use truncation:

• Austral*
  will find Australia, Australians, Australian, Australasia...

But be careful where you cut off the word - if you cut it off too early you'll find other words as well!

• Aust*
  will find Australia, Australians, Australian, Australasia... PLUS austral, austere etc.

Very handy where there are plurals involved.

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