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For my second blog post, I chose an online source off of the ScienceDirect database. The article is titled, ‘Dung beetles and nutrient cycling in a dryland environment’, and it will be published to CATENA journal in August 2019.
https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/science/article/pii/S0341816219301286#!
This online article fits the category of ‘Academic, peer-reviewed research material’. The tutorial in Module 1 on ‘how to evaluate sources of scientific information’ outlined the key differences between the four categories of information sources. The first step taken in classifying this source as academic material was the author’s expertise. The primary author, M. Belén Maldonado, is part of an Argentinian research collaboration, IADIZA, and has had a few of his research articles published to various science journals. This article includes in-text citations- an example on page 67, “Dung beetles, as well as termites, perform an important ecological function incorporating livestock dung to the soil and promoting pasture regeneration (Schowalter, 2016).” Also, at the bottom of the report, there is a properly formatted bibliography. My next step in this discrimination process was to figure out if this article had been reviewed by at least one referee before publication, and I found an initial revision of the manuscript was carried out by Silvina Verez. This narrowed the article down to a peer-reviewed source. My next inquiry was whether or not it included a results and methods section. A methods section, outlining the general procedure and instruments used, was present in the article under the Methods subtitle.
