Find Background Info
Background sources, such as specialized encyclopedias and dictionaries, are an essential piece of the research process. They can help you:
- Gather information about your topic and understand the scope of the research
- Locate reliable sources and clarify keywords
- Pinpoint important authors, texts, ideas, and keywords about the research area.
Knowing what the primary phrases and concepts are will help you a lot
as you are searching library databases and online sources.
Credo Reference
Credo Reference is a multi-publisher collection of high-quality reference titles. Available titles also include a range of multimedia options, including thousands of high quality diagrams, photographs, maps, and audio files. Credo includes several books on topics in biology, including:
Search Credo Reference
Science Resource Center
The Science Resource Center provides easy access to a wealth of full-text, science-oriented content including science encyclopedias, reference books, periodicals, and other reliable sources. In addition, the database includes a vast collection of images from sources such as UPI, Getty, NASA, National Geographic, and the Nature Picture Library.
Search
Science Resource Center
Find Books and Films
Print and e-books are valuable sources for academic research. They will help you to gain an overview of your topic and often contain in-depth information
about the scholarship or history of research on a subject. Some books are written by single authors while others include essays or chapters by multiple
scholars within a discipline. Don’t let the length of books intimidate you because you don’t need to read them from cover to cover. Look at the
table of contents and index to find the sections that are relevant to your work.
Find Books Using GriffinSearch
You can use GriffinSearch to find print and e-books available through Giovale Library. To get started, search by keyword or type in the title of a book
here:
WorldCat
WorldCat.org lets you search for books, articles, videos, and other material that are available in libraries worldwide. If you are doing in-depth
research on a topic and are considering requesting resources through interlibrary loan, WorldCat can help you discover resources that might not be in the
Giovale Library collection.
Search WorldCat
InterLibrary Loan (ILL)
InterLibrary Loan is a service where patrons of one library can borrow books and other materials, and access journal articles that are owned by another
library.
InterLibrary Loan
Utah Academic Library Consortium
Giovale Library participates in the Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC) and Westminster College students have reciprocal circulation privileges at
UALC partner libraries. Each UALC library has different circulation policies, but all require a
current, valid, legal photo identification and proof of current enrollment at Westminster. Some libraries may also require other verification methods, so it
is recommended that you contact the member library you are interested in for details.
Utah Academic Library Consortium
Academic Videos Online (AVON)
AVON provides unlimited access to a comprehensive selection of videos curated for the educational experience.
Search Academic Videos Online
Videos about Biology
Popular Titles and Featured Texts
Climate Change Biology
The Epigenetics Revolution
Founding Gardeners
Advances in Animal Science and Zoology
Find Articles
The Giovale Library provides access to a number of subject databases that you can use to find journal articles on topics within a specific discipline or
field of study. The databases listed on this page are those that are most useful for finding research published in Biology.
GriffinSearch
GriffinSearch is a good starting place if you are looking for books, journal articles, films, and other material available in the library. In addition to
searching the Giovale Library catalog for physical materials, GriffinSearch finds e-books and articles from several of our databases.
Search
GriffinSearch
Springer EJournals Collection
Springer eJournals Collection provides full-text access to over 1,900 peer-reviewed journals covering numerous disciplines from the sciences such as biomedical sciences, chemistry, environmental sciences, life sciences, physics, public health, and more. When searching all of SpringerLink, refine your results under content type by journal articles to limit your results to full text articles.
Search Springer
Science Direct
ScienceDirect is a leading full-text scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters. Journals are guided by eminent editorial boards and articles are rigorously peer-reviewed. Books on ScienceDirect cover 24 subject collections across disciplines such as biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, chemistry, clinical medicine, engineering and environmental science.
Search Science Direct
Birds of North America
Birds of North American Online (BNA) provides comprehensive life histories for each of the over 716 species of birds breeding in the USA (including Hawaii) and Canada. Image and video galleries showing plumages, behaviors, habitat, nests and eggs, and more. In addition, BNA features recordings of the songs and calls of their species. Contents are updated frequently, with contributions from researchers, citizen scientists, and designated reviewers and editors.
Search Birds of North America
Environmental Studies Research Guide
See the companion research guide for the Environmental Studies program for more links to focused environmental and conservation resources.
Citing Sources
Citing your sources helps you avoid plagiarism and shows that you’ve done research to become knowledgeable about your topic. Proper citations allow
your readers to track down your sources and help them understand how your research is connected to the work of others in your field. On this page, you will
find guides and tools to help you format citations, and you will learn about what constitutes plagiarism.
How to Cite Sources
With all of the many ways that you can plagiarize someone’s work, either accidentally or on purpose, how can you make sure that you’re citing
your sources correctly each and every time? One way is to become familiar with reputable sources that will help you learn or confirm that how you are citing
your source is correct.
PurdueOWL contains writing guides, grammatical rules, and citation help that will assist with many writing projects. They offer a detailed Formatting Guide for APA and MLA citation, which contains complete examples for just about any source you may use in footnotes/endnotes, in-text citations and reference lists.
Zotero is the ideal tool to gather, analyze, and document all of your sources.
It is compatible with GriffinSearch and other library databases, allowing you to save citations and articles while you research. Visit the
Zotero website to find out more, or stop by the library for some help getting started.
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism means taking someone else’s work or ideas and trying to pass them off as your own. Plagiarism can either be intentional
or unintentional, and even the most careful writer could accidentally plagiarize without fully knowing it. For example, did you know that
it is plagiarism even if you misattribute a quote to the wrong author? Even if you cited the source and took care to put it in your bibliography,
if the wrong person received credit for someone else’s work, it can still be considered plagiarism. Other forms of plagiarism include:
- Copying and pasting someone else’s work and turning it in as your own
- Using a quote from someone without giving them credit
- Not putting a quotation in quotation marks
- Changing a few words here and there, but keeping the main ideas of a sentence without giving credit to the original author
- Copying pictures from Google or another website to use without saying where you found the image
Of course, all of these scenarios of potential plagiarism can be avoided by knowing how to properly cite your sources.
