| BNFO 300 |
How to Create a Bibliography |
Fall 2013
|
|
Finding research articles Why create a bibliography?
Creating a nearly exhaustive bibliography on a narrow subject will immediately vault you into a position of scientific expertise in your chosen field. You probably won't believe this, but it's ridiculously easy to become an expert, if you set limits, and everyone should experience the feeling of knowing more than almost anyone in the world on a topic. If you do this right, you should have that feeling. But there are far more than psychological benefits. An exhaustive bibliography gives you an outline of what is known and therefore what is NOT known. This will prove invaluable as you search for a question that will serve as the basis of your research proposal. Building a bibliography
You will probably be the first person on earth to go through this excercise with your particular topic. You will therefore become the world's leading expert on what articles have been written in the area you have defined. Note that I'm not suggesting that you read all those articles. But absorbing the message of their titles will help you see what has been done in the area and what has not. That's a big step in itself. Here are some strategies that might be helpful: Your mentor has thought a lot about the topics that concern the lab. Ask for a review or research proposal if his/her own that may serve as a good overview of the field. If you begin with a huge fuzzy idea (Parkinson's Disease,... ecology,... marmosets), you are likely to lose your way in the literature. Instead, try starting with a specific article -- why not one from your mentor's lab? Identify a topic within it and treat it as your focus. Identify references in your focus article that speak to the matter at hand. Don't be led astray by references that connect primarily through methodology. Use Web of Science (or similar) to lead you to articles that cite key references you have found. Let the reviewer do your work for you. The main use of a review article is to organize a field and point you to useful references. You're going to quickly run out of air unless you have a system to keep track of what you've found. There's software designed specifically for this purpose. Mendeley is an example of free software that works well, allowing you to organize references, search through their full text, and provide tags that put the articles in categories you devise. You can also store your own notes on the article. Even Excel is better than nothing. Give them personalities. The time honored way to do this is by naming references, generally the first author followed by the year. You'll find that you can have whole conversations with your mentor where half of the content are references: "Beezer et al (2001) said that..." and "Carpluss et al (2005) did pretty much the same thing in a different organism...". When your list has reached a minimal stage of maturity, run it by your mentor, asking whether s/he can find any major hole. Don't be surprised if you've found articles your mentor doesn't know about. Write notes to yourself (see Organize your references, above), as you find something interesting concerning an article. The notes can remind you what the article is about.
The details of the format of your submitted bibliography are unimportant. APA format, Chicago citation style,... Sheesh! Who cares? There are almost as many reference formats as there are journals. What's important is that you are helpful to your reader. You can be helpful by:
|