Top Databases for Marine Biology and Ocean Sustainabiity
Wikipedia and Google Scholar should only be starting points for your research. Wikipedia entries are not reliable sources because they aren't reviewed rigorously, but the references and external links may be helpful to you. Google Scholar contains scholarly articles, but not from all scholarly journals that are published. That's why you should search in the databases listed below as well as Google Scholar to be certain you get good coverage of your topic. Have fun searching!
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Environment completeFind articles about both topics in this EBSCOhost database that monitors over 2100 mainly scholarly journals in the field of environmental science. This database can be searched at the same time as GreenFILE.
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GreenfileThis database contains scholarly articles, government documents, and general interest articles on the topics of marine biology and ocean sustainability. The emphasis of the database is human impact on the environment. This can be searched at the same time as Environment Complete.
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Science & technology collectionThis database contains scholarly articles and other types of publications about all areas of science and their applications. It can be searched at the same time as Environment Complete and GreenFILE through the EBSCOhost interface.
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Web of scienceThis is actually a multi-disciplinary database containing the top journals in each field. The database also tells you how many times articles have been cited and provides the h index for authors. Follow the green Find Full Text buttons to locate the articles.
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Wildlife & Ecology Studies WorldwideWildlife & Ecology Studies Worldwide is the largest index to literature about wild mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. It covers many wildlife subjects including individual species, habitat types, wildlife behavior, ecotourism and zoology. Coverage dates back to 1892 and continues up to the present day.
Find Articles is a resource that searches through 92% of our databases at once and identifies peer-reviewed and full text articles on your topic. You'll get lots of hits, so remember to refine your results and add more search terms as needed.
Primary and Secondary Sources
Often when doing a research assignment, you are required to use only primary or secondary sources. What is the difference between them?
Primary sources in science are based on first-hand observation, experimentation, or modeling and report new research or findings. Examples of primary sources are:
- a journal article reporting new findings from a laboratory
- a report on new findings from a wildlife management study
- the handwritten instructions for how to do a new lab procedure
Secondary sources analyze and interpret primary sources. These are examples in science:
- an article reviewing the last 10 years of published research about penguins (often called a review article or literature review)
- a book about the discovery of DNA structure
- a movie about the life of Charles Darwin
When searching for articles, you can find a primary source by adding [study] to your search terms and can find a secondary source by adding [review] to your search terms. These terms appear in the abstracts of the journal articles.
What is Peer Review?
Many instructors require you to use peer-reviewed sources for your papers and projects, but what does that mean?
- Peer review is the process of having experts in a field review the quality of an article or book before it is published
- Most articles in scholarly and academic journals are peer-reviewed
- Books published by university or academic presses are peer-reviewed
Most databases allow you to limit your search to peer-reviewed articles. Here are two examples:
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Academic search completeCheck the "Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals" box under "Limit Your Results"
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Research librarySelect "peer-reviewed" beneath the search box.
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