This page provides a summary of the Library resources you will find useful for your Ecology poster. I will keep it up for you for the remainder of the semester. Check back from time to time for updated content. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Celia Brinkerhoff, Biology Librarian (celia.brinkerhoff@kpu.ca)
Let's build a set of resources that will give you some background information on these two sites. This will stay up for the semester. Feel free to add more sources.
Search the Township of Langley for information about Williams Park, and the City of Langley for information about Logan Creek.
You might also try using an advanced Google search with your keywords, and restricting the search to one of the above sites using the "site:." command. This will return results containing your search terms only from pages on the site you are interested in. This is a good way to eliminate advertisements, or websites that are irrelevant,
Click on the screenshot below to see the search results. Each result should contain the search terms, and only appear on the Township of Langley's site.
These local environmental protection organizations publish information on their activities in the area, including mapping, sampling and stewardship.
Use the Library's catalogue to find books about the history of Langley.
Try using the terms Langley history or Fort Langley.
Most items will be in print, and available at the Langley campus.
There are also a few print maps available. You can find these by searching Langley Maps.
The library subscribes to a database of local and regional newspapers such as the Langley Advance, Peace Arch News, and Delta Optimist. These can be great sources of local news and activities in the area. Coverage goes back at least to 2002. You will need to log in with your KPU ID if accessing off campus.
Try searching with a city name or the name of a creek or river, and additional terms like conservation, stewardship, biodiversity, etc.
Here is a sample search:
Langley AND Salmon River AND wetlands.
Scientific articles published in scholarly journals are highly focussed and written by scholars for other scholars and experts in the field. They either report on primary research done by the scientists themselves, or provide a review and evaluation of the research in a given area (systematic review or meta-analysis).
The Introduction or Materials and Methods section of a primary research article will be good places to look for supporting your predictions and justifying your sampling protocol.
Below are the research databases we recommend for starting your scientific article search.
Remember: It's good research strategy to do your searches in MORE THAN ONE database.
To browse the more than 200 databases the library subscribes to, please visit our Research database page.
A library database provides access to the contents of thousands of scholarly journals, sometimes covering a particular discipline or sometimes multi-disciplinary in scope, meaning they may cover many subject areas.
Better than a Google search, databases come with tools that help you refine your search to get more relevant results, as well as links to related articles. In most cases, you can be confident that the articles you find will be credible sources to incorporate into your writing.
Here is an introduction to searching Academic Search Complete, one of the library's largest, multi-disciplinary databases. Although the interface is somewhat different than the "Best bets" listed on the tab to the left, the method of searching and the tools will be similar.
Key features of most databases:
Add Google Scholar to your suite of research tools. Google Scholar is a search engine that covers much of the scholarly, peer reviewed literature from academic publishers, plus conferences, theses and dissertations, abstracts and more. Some of the content is available full text, and some will be citation-only.
You can configure your settings to include links to articles available from Kwantlen Polytechnic Library subscription journals to avoid hitting publishers' paywalls. See the screenshot below.
Want a quick introduction to searching Google Scholar, including Advanced Search? Thanks to the University of Alabama Libraries for this video.
Don't forget about Open Access journals. These are scholarly, peer reviewed journals available for free (they do not require a KPU login).
For more information about Open Access journals, please visit the Open Access Publishing page on our Research, Scholarship, and Publishing at KPU guide.
Here are some of the important Open Access journal collections for Biology. Use the links below, or simply do a Google search for them. Keep these in mind for when you are no longer affiliated with KPU, but want access to quality, scientific literature.
Refer to the Library's APA citation style guide for examples of properly formatted references. The links below will take you directly to the page providing details for each type of source.
You will also need to note sources for any figures, graphs, etc. that you include in your poster. Whether you create figures using your own data or data from another source, or you incorporate a figure from somewhere else, you still need to let your readers know where the information came from.
See the Tables, figures and images tab on the library's APA guide for details.
The following online guides provide some tips for including information about your sources on your poster. While APA does not explicitly say how to do this, make sure you clearly acknowledge where you are getting your data from. This will lend more credibility to your work, and allow your readers to follow up.
Consider including a brief or partial citation underneath your source, and then create a separate list of all sources used with complete APA references.
APA does not provide clear guidance on how to cite statistical sources. If you are using data found in a report or journal article, you will cite that source. However, if you are using data directly from a collecting agency such as Statistics Canada or BC Stats, you will need to include all the information necessary to guide your reader to your source.
Statistics Canada has a page outlining how it would like users to cite its products.
See How to Cite Statistics Canada Products for full details.
Here is an example of citing data found in one of its tables:
