For decades at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the Biology Bibliographic Practicum has been a required one-credit course taught to majors who may take it in any year from Sophomore to Senior. The course has been very well-received by the Biology faculty because it made their students better equipped for advanced term paper and thesis work, and because it was taught by a legend on campus, the only librarian on staff to have reached University Professor rank, Luti Salisbury, past Chair of SLA’s Food, Agriculture & Nutrition Division and past President of the US Agricultural Information Network . (She has since gone on to assume the leadership of the newly refurbished Chemistry & Biochemistry Library on campus. )
The course typically focused on building information skills via searching and correctly citing the literature of one assigned topic for the whole class. Perhaps her most famous assignment in any of the many courses she has taught on campus focused on Brassica rapa , a turnip that is a kind of biological education triple-threat: it is widely commercially cultivated in the South for both its edible greens and bulbous taproot, increasing its interest to our many agriculture students, and yet this Brassica also escapes intended cultivation to become a wild invasive plant making it an interesting case study for the ecologists, and finally the Wisconsin Fast Plants variety of this Brassica is used in the university’s freshman biology laboratory teaching exercises owing to its rapid sprouting and maturation, making multiple physiological comparison tests possible over the course of a single academic year possible.
It had nonetheless become apparent that when many students (up to 80) were doing exactly the same assignment with intervals of only a few years between topical reappearances, copying the work of one good student in the class would often obviate the need for the rest of the class to do the exercise, assuming that diligent student would look for any newly appearing references in the literature since the previous time the topic was assigned. Moreover, no matter what topic was assigned to the entire class, at least one half (either those concentrating on organismal, ecological, ethological and evolutionary biology or those largely pursuing molecular and cellular biology) was going to be somewhat disappointed , and there was sometimes not much in the way of interest to the growing number of premeds.
I inherited the Practicum, and asked myself two questions:
How could I cut down on the possibility of cheating through copying?
Could I teach the class anything else that was new to them, and important to their work with their professors, without losing any of the skills successfully imparted by my predecessor in the previous exercises, namely successful searching of databases and learning how to cite articles correctly within text and at the end of reports?
Creating 80 different assignments
The first question was the most quickly decided but most difficult to carry out: I would simply come up with 80 different questions or themes, a different one for each student. I would try to preserve the searching skills part of the previous assignment, in the sense that each topic would require finding from three to five references from some combination of Biological Abstracts, PubMed, World of Science, or Aquatics Sciences & Fisheries Abstracts . The content of these found articles would then be synthesized into a one page summary, in which within-the-text citations (name-date) were correctly used, and which would be followed by a bibliography in a directed style (Council of Scientific Editors, 7th ed.).
Each assignment was written on the back of my new business cards, which the students randomly drew from a hat, and which they were encouraged to keep so as to be able to contact me at any time for assistance. Students who had drawn a question that they did not like were allowed to swap it for one that was unclaimed by others (the enrollment was 58, but 80 cards had been prepared) or they could exchange their card with any willing classmate from the other side of the great biological interest divide. I also put in about a dozen premedical interest questions, roughly matching their representation in class.
Some samples of topics:
How is mitochondrial DNA like a passport that has been in your family for generations and has stamps from everywhere they ever went?
Watch out who you are calling junk DNA: Introns vs. Exons
Do highly conserved gene sequences make you vote Republican?
Are there cytoskeletons in your closet?
Winning by a knockout gene.
World-Wide Wrestling without Pay-per-View or anyone throwing folding chairs around: Physeter macrocephalus vs. Architeuthis dux
Is your date costing you an arm and a leg? Find five accounts of sexual cannibalism and bribery via nuptial gift-giving.
Yummy, umami.
You can salt your food, but can you saltate around campus?
Who’s smarter ? Your roommate or an African Grey Parrot?
How They Did On Retrieving Papers, Writing Summaries & Citing Sources Correctly
The students did very well in retrieving serious scholarly or professional on-point references when they used the suggested databases above. The clear favorite of the students who took the recommended path of searching science-oriented databases was the Web of Science, and then PubMed , followed by Biological Abstracts and ASFA.
They did far less well when using Google or respectable college level but nonetheless generic databases like Academic Search Premier, ProQuest , and sometime Lexis-Nexis, largely because they kept coming up with stories from popular newspapers or magazines, and treating them as if they were articles in Nature or Science. (This was despite the fact that you could limit your search to scholarly items in some of these latter databases…the kids had simply become so familiar with them through successful uses in other non-Science classes, that they continued to use them, even in this assignment .)
Students who cited a serious “starter” reference that did not count towards their article total, but which they were encouraged to use to get them up to speed on their topic, did much better on writing their one page summaries, because they had developed a better sense of where their assigned topic fit into the larger picture of biology or medicine.
While a number of print reference sources were recommended (handbooks, field-guide, treatises, graduate & professional level comprehensive texts) , and used , electronic versions of reference resources were overwhelmingly the favorite. The favorite among these was the new version of Access Science from McGraw-Hill, , followed by the Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (now also McGraw-Hill), and electronic versions of the Oxford Reference Series.
Wikipedia was mentioned the most often among sources that were clearly indicated by this instructor as “iffy.” I subsequently examined those Wikipedia’s entries used in this exercise. They varied rather widely in length and sophistication, but contained no glaring errors.
Within-text citing was pretty good although several students thought that B.V. Elsevier, John Wiley, and perhaps “Jerry” Springer were authors. The bibliographies were all over the map in terms of quality and consistency, with one very good predictor. Whatever bibliographic style was used by the databases they chose to use , was likely to be the style they cut-and-pasted or otherwise used in the bibliography despite instructions otherwise. This was particularly the case with those students who chose Academic Search Premier and Proquest, which use a kind of high school or public library citing style, for lack of a better description.
It was not uncommon to find two or three differing styles in the same short bibliography, depending on the number of different databases used. This was sometimes amusing in that the same journal was cited entirely differently in the same bibliography because one article from the journal came from one database while the other article in the same journal came from another, and neither matched the assigned method.
I would have liked like to say, in a kind of “I told-you-so, school-marmish “ way, that poor bibliographies correlated with poor article retrieval, interpretation, and summarization, but this was not the case. There were as many excellent one-page summaries from bad bibliographers as from good ones. The students simply viewed the subject material as interesting, important, and worth paying attention to, and preoccupation with documentation details as rather silly.
Two Journal Worlds I Wanted Them to Explore
The second challenge in changing the exercise was perhaps the boldest. I wanted the class to focus not only on Boolean operators (which they intuitively grasped) or the mechanics of punctuating their citations (which they openly despised as trivial) , but rather to explore two journal worlds though these exercises (something about which they really didn’t have a clue, but had a gut feeling they ought to know more about).
The first of these worlds included the most prominent journals in the main topics within biology or medicine, no matter where it was studied in the world. The second was the smaller world of journals within which their particular faculty mentors published and cited on a regular basis. Ideally, the two worlds would be one and the same, but this is rarely the case in all but the very largest biological sciences departments, so some discordance and some gaps were anticipated, and eventually found. Once again, I included some discussion of medical journals for the premeds.
My three fifty minute lectures included a survey of the following areas of biology & related areas of medicine along with the journals that dominated them:
- The great multispecialty journals of importance to Biology (e.g. Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLoS Biology, FASEB Journal)
- The great journals of clinical investigation (e.g. JAMA, Lancet, Nature Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, PloS Medicine).
- Cell Biology (e.g. Cell, Journal of Cell Biology, Molecular Biology of the Cell, Journal of Cell Science, Nature Cell Biology).
- Pure & Applied Microbiology, Infection & Immunity (e.g. Journal of Bacteriology, Microbiology, Applied &Environmental Microbiology, Journal of Virology, Virology, Journal of Parasitology, Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Disease, Journal of Immunology, Immunity, Nature Immunology, Journal of Autoimmunity)
- Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (e.g. Journal of Biological Chemistry, Journal of Molecular Biology. EMBO Journal, Molecular Cell)
- General Genetics & Genomics (e.g. Genetics, Molecular Genetics & Genomics, Genome Research)
- Genetics in the Context of Development, Mutations & Inherited Medical Conditions & Disease Propensity (Genes & Development, Developmental Cell, Developmental Biology, Development, Environmental & Molecular Mutagenesis, Mutation Research, American Journal of Human Genetics, Oncogene, Cancer Cell, Birth Defects Research)
- The functioning adult organism: general physiology & human systems physiology (e.g. the American Journal of Physiology, Journal of General Physiology, Journal of Physiology, Journal of Neurophysiology, Gastroenterology, Chest, Kidney International, etc.)
- The Physiological & Behavioral Adaptations of Animals to their Environment (Journal of Experimental Biology, Journal of Comparative Physiology, Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, Animal Behaviour, Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology, Journal of Comparative Psychology, Journal of Animal Ecology)
- Plants (e.g. American Journal of Botany, International Journal of Plant Sciences, Plant Physiology, Plant Cell, Journal of Ecology, Vegetation Science)
- More General Journals of General Zoology & Entomology (e.g. Journal of Zoology, Integrative & Organismal Biology, Journal of Mammalogy, Copeia, Auk, Entomological Society of America Annals, Invertebrate Biology)
- Field Biology, Ecology, Wildlife & Conservation (e.g. American Midland Naturalist, Southeastern Naturalist, Southwestern Naturalist, Canadian Field Naturalist, American Naturalist, Ecology, Ecological Applications, Conservation Biology, Biological Conservation, Journal of Wildlife Management)
- Aquatic Ecology ( Limnology & Oceanography, Marine Biology, Hydrobiologia, Freshwater Biology, Journal of the North American Benthological Society ).
- Systematics & Evolution (e.g. Systematic Biology, Systematic Entomology, Systematic Botany, Molecular Phylogenetics & Evolution, Molecular Biology & Evolution, Evolution)
- Primatology, Biological Anthropology, Human Evolution, General & Vertebrate Paleontology (American Journal of Primatology, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Journal of Human Evolution, Journal of Paleontology, Palaeontology, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology)
Were the Journal Worlds I Showed Them,
the Journal Worlds They Discovered for Themselves?
There was a surprisingly tight clustering of journals used by the students to answer all their assigned questions or topics, despite the fact that they had electronic access to several thousand titles. In a class with 58 different problems, with 3-5 references per paper, theoretically yielding possibly as many as 290 unique journals, only 97 journals accounted for all the reference lists.
Thirty of the 86 journals I mentioned in class made it into the students bibliographies. This 30 something % yield, would seem disheartening except for the fact that many of these were multiply cited. The students seem to grasp that these journals were more important and used them more often.
Science, Nature, PNAS, Cell, the Journal of Bacteriology, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry were dominant in the molecular and cellular group. The premed problems featured the usual suspects, notably JAMA and the NEJM, the American Journal of Human Genetics, Oncogene, and some organ-system entries, Endocrinology and Gastroenterology. Emerging Infectious Diseases was the youngest, and only Open Access journal to make a splash.
The Organismal, Ecology, Ethology & Evolutionary students favored American Naturalist, Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology, Biological Conservation, Plant Ecology, American Midland, Southeastern & Southwestern Naturalist (the latter three Naturalist journals containing many wildlife papers pertinent to Arkansas, which is a three-way crossroads state among the Midwest (cornfields for miles) , Southeast (alligators) , and the Southwest (rattlesnakes).
How did the students fare in exploring the world of their faculty mentor’s journal use? Owing to an exhaustive study by three of my University of Arkansas Libraries colleagues, the aforementioned University Professor Librarian Luti Salisbury, her former & my current my graduate assistant in Agriculture Sherea Dillon, and Physics Librarian & Professor Usha Gupta, we have a detailed listing of every journal within which a campus professor in any department published, or which they cited for the last three years. This fine work enabled me to determine that the exercises also brought my students into contact with 28 journals within which their faculty mentors had published, and with 34 other journals that these biology professors had cited, but within which they had not recently published.
In the end I determined two things about the new exercise. You can take undergraduates to the veritable River Jordan , and baptize them in the waters of correct citing and reference-making according to style, and indeed you may dunk them in for a while, but you cannot make them true believers. That may come later. But if you give each one of them their own boat, they’ll go down that river, often use your chart to often navigate through the best channels, and sometimes see their faculty mentors sailing on ahead along the way, but in any case they will ultimately discover their own journal world.
In closing, I’d like to thank pioneers like Luti Salisbury, my long-suffering colleagues at the Main Library Reference Desk who fielded these many new questions, Sherea Dillon, my graduate assistant, and Usha Gupta, the manger of the Physics Library, for helping Luti in compiling the database that enabled me to check the effectiveness of my approach for putting the students in the midst of their faculty’s journal worlds.
Now, on to making up 80 new questions for next year.
Tony Stankus [email protected] Life Sciences Librarian & Professor, University of Arkansas Libraries MULN 223E, 365 North McIlroy Avenue, Fayetteville, AR 72701-4002 Voice: (479) 575-4031 Fax: (479) 575-4592
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