The Desert Tree Lizard
Ecology, Behavior, Reproduction, and Habitat
Library Exercise
LSC 311 – Fall 2005
Arizona State University West
Instructional Objectives
Participants will be able to:
- Decode and recognize the elements of a citation;
- Differentiate among peer reviewed, primary and secondary articles;
- Know that RefWorks is a citation management program that can help students and faculty organize journal articles and print bibliographies;
- Understand how Boolean operators can narrow or expand research results;
- Use a basic and advanced search screens in a science database;
- Know how to mark, save, and export references into citation management software (RefWorks);
- Share a common RefWorks account for a team, creating separate research folders for each team member’s research;
- Print a bibliography in a style of Ecology Journal;
- Synthesize information from a primary research article, share the results with the team, and write a brief paragraph about a scenario for further study;
- Use the information gained about searching science databases to find journal articles for Laboratory Exercise #5 and subsequent labs.
Introduction
You are part of a team that is requesting funding by the National Science Foundation to do research on the Tree Lizard, Urosaurus ornatus. Each member of your group has an area of expertise; you are the group expert on Tree Lizard ___________. Other members of your group specialize in Urosaurus ornatus behavior, reproduction, ecology and habitat. You will use the results of your individual preliminary research to prepare a summary of how your team might use the NSF money to study tree lizards.
There are four parts to this lab:
- In part 1, you will open an account in RefWorks, a program that helps store and manage journal articles and prepare bibliographies (20 minutes).
- In part 2, you will perform a library search in BIOSIS Previews. You will locate a peer-reviewed article on Urosaurus ornatus ___________. You will export references from the search into your team RefWorks account (60 minutes).
- In part 3, you will produce a bibliography of selected references from your search results using one of the most dramatic and easy to use features of RefWorks (15 minutes)
- In part 4 of the lab, you will meet with your team to share information from your primary research articles and to write a summary suggesting how you might design a study to spend NSF money and study the tree lizard. The summary should include the following elements: a location or habitat where you could study the tree lizard; the optimum time of the year (and possibly the time of day) to study the tree lizard; and a question of interest to your group for further study (45 minutes).
Part 1: Open an account for your team in RefWorks
RefWorks is a citation management program that lives on the web and can be accessed by faculty or students from any location – home, work, or school, to organize research and print bibliographies. Any ASU student or faculty member can open an account in RefWorks. In fact, you can have multiple accounts, one for each research project you are doing.
RefWorks has advantages for team research. All four of your team members can access the same account by using the login name and password that you use to create the account. For example, if your team name is the pushups, you can use that word as the team login and the team password and the screen would look like the image below. One of your team members should create an account in RefWorks using your team name for the login and password. 
Each individual team members should login to the team account and create a new folder based on their area of expertise. As the expert in ecology, your folder will be named “Ecology.” This is the folder where you, as the team ecology expert, will import search results from the search you will do in the next part of this lab. After creating your folder, close RefWorks. Members of your group will also create folders labeled Habitat, Reproduction, and Behavior.
Part 2A. Perform a search on your topic in BIOSIS Previews
Open up a web browser and go to the library homepage at http://library.west.asu.edu/
Click on the database finder from the library homepage.
Scroll down to select Biology from the database finder
Now scroll down through the Biology resources until you see BIOSIS Previews.
Select and login to Biosis Previews using the on campus link. In the Search window, do a basic search for Urosaurus ornatus AND ___________. The AND will combine all records in the database that discuss Urosaurus ornatus and all records in the database that discuss Ecology.
Take a look at your search results. When you click on the Get It! @ ASU logo, you will see a screen that looks like the one below. You may be able to follow the links until you find the full text of the article. If your article is not available in full text, you may use the abstract to answer questions. Question 1: Open the worksheet at http://tinyurl.com/dk83r and Mark all of the following that are true about Get it@ASU.
From the results of your search in BIOSIS Previews, select a primary research article on the ___________ of Urosaurus ornatus. You will use this article to make recommendations about how you might spend NSF funds to study the Tree Lizard. Question 2: Record the elements of the citation of the primary journal article in the worksheet. Include the following elements: Author’s name, Title of the article, Title of the Journal, Volume, Issue, Date, Page number.
Mark and save the primary journal article you selected and save it to the desktop. Open RefWorks. When you select References, Import (on the far left below) you will be prompted to fill in the fields indicating the vendor, database and location/name of the file saved on the desktop. Fill out the form as in the example below, click Browse to select the downloaded file, and click the Import button. The RefWorks window will open, log in again, and your article will import into View Last Imported Folder.
Part 2B: Perform a Search in CSA Abstracts
Another good source for articles on your topic is CSA Abstracts. Find the CSA Gateway by clicking on Databases by Title (A-Z).
Now select CSA (Gateway) from the listing of databases.
Select Advanced Search (Advanced search gives you more options for combining and targeting your search). In the example below, I’ve searched for the words Urosaurus ornatus in the title of the journal article, while searching for habitat in the keyword field. Try your own combinations to get the best search results.
You can use one of the features of CSA to find peer-reviewed articles. Peer-reviewed articles are articles that have been reviewed by an editorial board. They are often required by instructors who will send you to a library database “to find a peer-reviewed article” on a topic. Notice in the graphic below that peer-reviewed journal is one of the publication types. By clicking on this green tab, you will see only articles that CSA has verified as been from peer-reviewed journals.
Question 3: Record the bibliographic information about at least one of the peer-reviewed journal article including the following bibliographic information: Author’s name, Title of the article, Title of the Journal, Volume, Issue, Date, Page number.
Mark records that look interesting to you. You will import these records into RefWorks.
When you click on Export to RefWorks, the application will launch, prompting you for your password. If RefWorks does not open automatically, make sure pop-up windows are enabled on your computer. (In CLCC 353, we have disabled pop-ups by clicking on Tools button and selecting that option from the dropdown menu. If you are having difficulty getting the Export to RefWorks function to work, try closing windows that you have opened.)
Part 3: Produce a bibliography using the records you imported. Login using your group name as in the picture below:
References that you selected will be imported into RefWorks
The citations are now in the Last Imported Folder. You can move them to the folder that you created earlier by selecting the bubble marked add as list and selecting the folder where the references should go, in this case, Ecology.
You will be prompted with a message asking if you really want to move the records to the selected folder.
Question 4: Now create a bibliography using the references you just placed in your folder. To produce a bibliography, click on Bibliography, select Ecology (see graphic below) as the output style, select HTML as the file type to create (ignore format paper and Bibliography). The bibliography is now available for you to email and download to a file or the screen. Cut and paste the bibliography into the worksheet.
Question 5: Meet with your group. Based on the information you learned about Urosaurus ornatus from your brief research, propose a location or habitat where you could study Urosaurus ornatus; the best time of the year or day to study the tree lizard; and a question of interest to your group for further study (45 minutes). Enter this information into the worksheet.