Information Literacy Tutorial for the Biological & Biomedical Sciences

This tutorial, a series of short readings and videos, will enable you to find good sources of scientific information for your lab reports and other scientific writing. 

You will also become familiar with ways of thinking about how information sources are produced, how to work with article databases, how to evaluate the quality of the information you find, and how to cite sources.  You can use these higher-level skills to do quality literature research in any of your courses. 

After completing this tutorial, you will be able to:

• Identify scientific research articles and other types of scientific communication.  Determine which sources are primary, secondary, scholarly, peer-reviewed, and popular.
• Think critically about a general topic and come up with broader, narrower, and alternative keywords to use while searching databases for articles.
• Familiarize yourself with research help, a database (PubMed, Scopus or both), and a citation management tool (RefWorks) available through the Arnold Bernhard Library.
• When searching a database, use Boolean operators, phrase search, and filters to get relevant results.
• Find articles' citations in the databases and get the full-text PDF of articles.
• Critically evaluate the authoritativeness, accuracy, and relevance of scholarly and popular scientific articles.
• Cite articles accurately in correct CSE style.

The last page of this tutorial contains a short survey.  You will complete it and provide the results to your professor so that they know you've completed the tutorial and are ready to do your literature research.

Welcome to the Arnold Bernhard Library!  We are happy to help you with any research questions you may have and will help you locate articles, book, and other materials for your courses and projects. 

Please watch the videos in this Research Guide to get oriented to the library and begin your research.

On most screens, navigation buttons for each page will display on the left.  In portrait mode, they will be near the top of the screen.

Your current screen’s navigation button is highlighted in orange and its contents are listed underneath it with a light gray background.

First time through the tutorial, go in order. 

The content is arranged in boxes from top to bottom.  Scroll down to view everything on a page.

Use the up arrow icon on the right to return to the top of the page.

At the bottom of each screen are Previous: and Next: buttons to help you move through the tutorial in order.

Once you’re familiar with the material, you can use the navigation buttons to skip to any part you wish to review.