Scientific Literature Search

The saying “Standing on Shoulders of Giants” is a metaphor that captures the essence of scientific discovery and writing. It expresses how truth today is discovered thanks to the discoveries of those that came before us. To write a proper scientific report, you too must stand on the shoulders of giants to understand how your own work fits into what has previously been discovered about the natural world. To do this, you must learn how to do a proper literature search AND how to synthesize their findings into an in-text citation. In-text citations of primary literature are crucial components to both the Introduction and Discussion sections of your reports.
First, write down the scientific name of your selected species in the box below:

Assignment: You must find 10 articles on the Ecology of your species, list them in the Ecology bibliographic style, and write an in-text citation sentence for each article.
Part 1: The Literature Search
We recommend you use Google Scholar as it is the most user-friendly and yields plenty of Ecology articles (https://scholar.google.com/). Type your species name into the search box. You may find that using other terms, such as the common name, or keywords relevant to the ecology of your species will help you find articles (e.g., I might include “pollination” if I am looking for papers on honeybees). If you find an article you like, you can click “Cited By” to see the articles that have cited that article in the past too! Find 10 articles on the Ecology of your species.

Part 2: The Bibliographic Style
Each scientific journal has its own bibliographic style they require authors follow when they submit articles to the journal. Like these journals, we require you to follow a particular bibliographic style for this class, the Ecology bibliographic style. Look at the example on the right. To get full points, your citations must look like this: “FirstAuthorLastname, FirstAuthorIntials, SecondAuthorInitials, SecondAuthorLastname, and LastAuthorInitials, LastAuthorLastname. Year. Title. Journal Volume:Pages.” On Google Scholar, if you click the quotation marks below the article you can find this information, but in different bibliographic formats. Alternatively, you can find this information in the article itself. List all 10 articles in the Ecology style.
Part 3: The In-Text Citation
A proper in-text citation adequately synthesizes information in a primary research article and includes a parenthesis at the end referencing the article the information is coming from. In Ecology (and science in general), we use in-text citations instead of quotes. Do not ever include direct quotes in your reports.
In-text citations can mention a finding, the main conclusion, or the methods employed in a study. Find in your 10 articles information that you can transcribe into an in-text citation and write one for each article.
For a one author study, your in-text citation would look like this:
Dispersal of V. nobilis nutmeg trees on Barro Colorado Island in Panama illustrates spatially biased survival for seeds and seedlings (Howe 1993).
For a two-author study, your in-text citation would look like this:
Adult “nurse” plants facilitate seed germination and shelter young seedlings (Franco and Nobel 1989).

For a three-author or more study, your in-text citation would look like this:

Ambrosia dumosa seedlings that survive the first few years in the open have a better chance of survival and growth than seedlings that establish under the protection of adult nurse shrubs (Miriti et al. 2001).

If you are referencing more than one study in the same sentence, separate the studies with a semicolon in alphabetical order:

Once thought to be primarily a means of colonizing distant places, seed dispersal may also be locally important if some species’ inability to get to a region or habitat affects community composition (Clark et al. 1998; Terborgh et al. 2002).

You may choose to reference a study by the author’s last name instead, in which case you only parenthesize the year:

In a dispersal study of the giant cactus Neobuxbaumia tetezo in Mexico, Godinez-Alvarez and colleagues (2002) find that a bat (Leptonycteris curasoae) is probably the most effective dispersal agent for this species.