The Biological Abstracts Database
Perhaps your lab assignment is to analyze the effects of fertilizer on the growth of corn and you need some scholarly journal articles for your lab report.
Begin by selecting some keywords to use in your search. "Corn" is also known as "maize," and the botanical name is "zea mays," so all three of these terms might be useful. "Fertilizer" could be either singular or plural, so you will want to use the wildcard symbol, an asterisk (fertilizer*), and you might try more specific terms like nitrogen or phosphorus instead.
For help constructing a keyword search, please see the OLLIE tutorial lesson Advanced Online Searching.
On the front page of the library's web site, mouse over the "Databases" button. Use the "Databases by Subject" link that appears in the menu. From the menu of subjects, choose "Biology/Agriculture" and click "GO." From the "Biology/Agriculture" page, click on "Biological Abstracts."
Note that although it looks exactly like the general subjects database "EBSCOhost Academic," it is not! Type your keywords inside the search box. We'll use the Boolean operators AND and OR to do an advanced search:
Example: (corn or maize or zea mays) and fertilizer* and growth
If you want to restrict your search results by a specific time span, use the "Date Published" feature. Select a month from the drop-down menu, then type in a year. We'll do January 2003 through December 2008. Then run your search.
Scroll down to see your results and choose an article. We got 210 results from this search. Click on an article's title for further information about the article, including the subjects covered in it and an "abstract," or summary.
Never write a paper using only the abstracts of articles--you MUST read the articles! For the steps involved in finding the complete article, see the OLLIE tutorial lesson Using Search for Full Text.
Let's try one more sample search and take a closer look at a few really useful strategies for this database. This time, our topic is plant competition. (In the photo, an automobile has lost a competition with a Kudzu vine!) Once again, we start by typing a search into Biological Abstracts.
New example search: growth and plant and competition
We got way too many results: 7,322. But if we scroll down, we can narrow our results by choosing a subject from the yellow "Narrow Search Results" section at the left side of the screen. We'll click on the suggested subject "Agriculture." We are still getting too many results, 2,173. Let's scroll down and choose one more subject to add to our search. This time we'll click on "crop yield." Sweet! Now we have 66 items.
We can also add our own additional subject to narrow the results. In the search box, the text of the search we've constructed so far is visible. It says:
( growth and plant and competition ) and DE "Agriculture" and DE "crop yield"
We can change the search by editing this statement. Let's replace the last element of the search statement, DE "crop yield," with the word "California," and run the search. Perfect! Only 33 results.
Here's how you can email articles or citations to yourself. Items that have Full Text links available in Biological Abstracts can email the entire article. Items without Full Text links can only email you the citation and abstract. Remember, use the "Search for Full Text" button to track down these articles for copying or saving. Click the "Add to Folder" icon next to each item you want. When you are done adding items to you folder, scroll up and click on your folder icon (it will say "Folder has Items"). In your folder, click on "Select All" to send all the items you chose. Click the "Email" link. Enter you email address and a subject line, then click "Send."
The End.