Category: Post 2: Sources of Scientific Information

Post 2: Sources of Scientific Information

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The source of scientific information I chose comes from the TRU library. It is A conceptual framework for understanding the perspectives of the causes of the science-practice gap in ecology and conservation conducted by Diana Bertuol-Garcia, Carla Morsello, Charbel N. El-Hani, and Renata Pardini; all of who are considered experts in the field as they are employed by universities. This, along with in-text citations and a list of references confirms that the paper is academic. In the acknowledgement section, the author’s thank the two anonymous referees who reviewed the paper, making it peer-reviewed. The article includes methods and results sections making it a research paper. In all, the source is academic, peer-reviewed research material. The link for the source is below:

https://eds-b-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.tru.ca/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=9&sid=230560e1-28de-4db5-b67d-97d73a65bde9%40pdc-v-sessmgr02

 This image demonstrates that the author’s are experts.

 This image demonstrates that there are in-text references and that the article contains a method’s section.

 This image demonstrates that there is a results section included. This image shows that two anonymous referees reviewed the paper.

This image demonstrates that there was a list of references included.

Blog Post 2: Sources of Scientific Information

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My chosen source of ecological information is the article “The vegetation, surface water chemistry, and peat chemistry of moderate-rich fens in central Alberta, Canada” published 1989 by Wai-Lin Chee and Dale Vitt.

This article can be found online at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225684988_The_vegatation_surface_water_chemistry_and_peat_chemistry_of_moderate-rich_fens_in_central_Alberta_Canada.

This piece of literature would be classified as academic, peer-reviewed research material.  I classified it as such for five reasons. Firstly, this is an academic paper because the authors of it are “experts in the field”, as both of them are affiliated with the University of Alberta. As well, the paper contains numerous in-text citations citing other scientific journals, and contains a Bibliography. This research can also be classified as peer-reviewed. While it doesn’t explicitly mention acknowledgment of a reviewer, the journal Wetlands, under which it was published, is peer-reviewed. This was stated in the website that can be found here: https://www.sws.org/Publications/wetlands-journal.html. Finally, this paper is research material, as the authors conducted a field study themselves. The Methods and Results of this research is included in the article. 

Post 2: Sources of Scientific Information

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Liu, Y., Dawson, W., Prati, D., Haeuser, E., Feng, Y., & van Kleunen, M. (2016). Does greater specific leaf area plasticity help plants to maintain a high performance when shaded? Annals of Botany, 118(7), 1329-1336. doi:10.1093/aob/mcw180   

The source I found is an article published in the journal Annals of Botany. I classified this source as academic peer-reviewed research material. The article was written by experts in the field of biology and plant sciences, who are associated with numerous reputable universities. The article contains frequent in-text citations from various sources and journals as well as a list of literature cited at the end of the text. I classified the article as peer-reviewed academic material since the authors acknowledge two anonymous referees who reviewed the article prior to publication. Finally, I identified the article as research material, since it contains a Materials and Methods section, as well as a Results section outlining a research study.

 

Blog Post 2 – Sources of Scientific Information

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I chose an article from the American Journal of Botany titled “Freeze‐induced cyanide toxicity does not maintain the cyanogenesis polymorphism in white clover (Trifolium repens)”. I sourced it from the University of Victoria’s online library database.

https://bsapubs-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/doi/abs/10.1002/ajb2.1134

The article can be classified as academic, peer-reviewed research material. It was written by four experts in the field, all of who hold PhDs and are in the Department of Biology at their respective universities. The article also includes many in text citations and a complete bibliography. On page 1230 in the acknowledgments section it is noted that the article was peer-reviewed by 2 anonymous reviewers. Finally the article can be easily determined to be research material rather than review material by the presence of both a “Methods” and “Results” section.

Blog Post 2: Sources of Scientific Information

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Blog Post 2: Sources of Scientific Information

Adrienne Burns

August 19, 2019

Citation

Gao, Jun-Qin; Duan, Mu-Ying; Zhang, Xiao-Ya; Li, Qian-Wei; Yu, Fei-Hai. CATENA. May 2018. ‘Effects of frequency and intensity of drying-rewetting cycles on Hydrocotyle vulgaris growth and greenhouse gas emissions from wetland microcosms.’ Vol. 164, p44-49. 6p. DOI: 10.1016/j.catena.2018.01.006. , Database: Academic Search Complete. Accessed TRU Library; Science Direct. August 19, 2019.

‘Effects of frequency and intensity of drying-rewetting cycles on Hydrocotyle vulgaris growth and greenhouse gas emissions from wetland microcosms,’ is an Academic, peer reviewed research paper.

 

The article is Academic material. It has been written by experts in the field of ecology. They are affiliated with two Universities, one in Beijing and one in Taizhou China.

Author Affiliations:

1School of Nature Conservation, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China
2Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Plant Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation, Taizhou University, Taizhou 318000, China

There is both in-text citations and a bibliography.

“Changes in intensity of drying-rewetting cycles can also alter ecosystem functioning (Ciais et al., 2005; Breda et al., 2006; Schwalm et al., 2010; Shi et al., 2014; Sun et al., 2016).”

The article has been peer reviewed. In the Acknowledgements, the authors thank 2 anonymous reviewers for their contribution.

We thank Ning Mai, Yi-Xuan Zhu and Cheng-Fu Wei for assistance with the experiment and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

It is a research paper because it has a ‘Methods’ and ‘Results’ section in the article.

2. Materials and methods 2.1. Experimental microcosm set-up

3.  Results 3.1. Effects of frequency and intensity on plant growth

 

 

Blog post 2: sources of scientific information

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I reviewed the article Late-Season Survey of Bumble Bees Along Canadian Highways of British Columbia and Yukon Territories. The article was found using TRU’s online database and the topic and abstract seemed interesting to me.

 

  1. a) The source of this article is the Western North American Naturalist journal. (https://ezproxy.tru.ca/login?url=https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.tru.ca/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=109305710&site=eds-live)
  2. b) The article in an academic, peer-reviewed, research article.
  3. c) This article is academic as it is written by experts in the field who are employed for ecological research groups and government agencies; in-text citations and a bibliography are present in the article. The article is peer-reviewed as evidenced by the inclusion of both ‘received’ and ‘accepted’ dates; googling the journal’s website shows that it is a peer-reviewed publication. Lastly, the article is a research article as data was collected by the authors and both a methods and a results section were included.

 

Blog Post 2: Sources of Scientific Information

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For my second blog post I chose a journal article entitled ‘The impact of river regulation on the biodiversity intactness of floodplain wetlands’ by Jan J. Kuiper, Jan H. Nanse, Sven Teurlincx, Jos T. A. Verhoeven and Rob Alkemade, published in Wetlands Ecology and Management in 2014.  I first considered the nature of my Field Research Project and then began a Google Scholar search of relevant material.  After finding and reading several relevant articles, I chose this one; a meta-analysis that includes data from other relevant articles that I had read.  A PDF was not readily available directly through Google Scholar, nor the Thompson Rivers University Library database.  However, a link to the author’s Research Gate profile provided open access to the article, from which I accessed the PDF.  This publication is academic, peer-reviewed, research material.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rob_Alkemade/publication/272040214_The_impact_of_river_regulation_on_the_biodiversity_intactness_of_floodplain_wetlands/links/54ef84df0cf25f74d7227d13/The-impact-of-river-regulation-on-the-biodiversity-intactness-of-floodplain-wetlands.pdf

Academic:  This publication was written by experts in the field: a university professor, a postdoctoral research fellow, a project manager and an independent researcher.  It includes in-text citations: “Moreover, measures of flow modification are mostly inconsistently reported in the literature (Olden and Poff 2003; Poff and Zimmerman 2010).”; “Poff et al. (2009) remarked that ecological changes may also be formalised and empirically tested when they are expressed as categorical responses.”.   A bibliography is provided.(see pages 656-658 in above link).

Peer-reviewed: This publication was peer-reviewed by two anonymous reviewers as stated in the acknowledgements section (see page 656 in above link).

Research Material: This publication includes both ‘methods’ and ‘results’ sections.

BLOG POST 2

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I chose the book of K. Fredrick for the analysis of heavy metals in soils and their influence on the envrionment. The book titled ‘Assessing the impacts of Climate Change on Natural Resource Systems’ was published by Springer Science & Business Media in 2012. The author from the biology department of University was K. Fredrick. This book is an academic piece because it is written by expert in the field (he represents University), it includes in text citations and a bibliography. This suggests that the book is peer-reviewed as it went through a revision process. The book lists a materials and methods section and a results section detailing the research that was conducted. This book is therefore a research piece. As a result, this book constitutes an academic, peer-reviewed material. It helped me a lot to understand different categories of heavy metals and their management in soil. Moreover, I got acquainted with such terms as pollutants and heavy metals in detail.

 

Frederick, K. 2012. Assessing the Impacts of Climate Change on Natural Resource Systems. Springer Science & Business Media.

Blog Post 2: Sources of Scientific Information

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Blog Post 2: Sources of Scientific Information

 

For this post, I chose the article “Influence of repeated fertilization on forage production for native mammalian herbivores in young lodgepole pine forests” written by Pontus M.F. Lindgren and Thomas P. Sullivan, from the Web of Science database.  This article is academic, peer-reviewed, research material.

Academic: This article can be considered academic because it includes in-text citations: “Stand thinning and fertilization are silvicultural practices designed to sustain wood and biomass production on a shrinking forest landbase while concurrently creating a diversity of forest habitat conditions to meet the goals of biodiversity conservation (Moore and Allen, 1999; Hartley, 2002; Monkkonen et al., 2014).”, and a list of references. In addition, author Thomas Sullivan belongs to the Applied Biology and Forestry departments at UBC, while Lindgren holds a PhD from the Department of Forestry at UBC.

Peer-reviewed: I determined the article to be peer-reviewed because a search of the publishing journal “Forest Ecology and Management” on the Elsevier database detailed the peer-review process the journal uses for all articles. Also, the article shows a “Revised” date of February 27, 2018, one month before the publishing date of March 20, 2018.

Research material: The article contains both a methods and results section, showing that the authors carried out original research and recorded their findings.

 

 

Citation:

Lindgren, P. M., & Sullivan, T. P. (2018). Influence of repeated fertilization on forage production for native mammalian herbivores in young lodgepole pine forests. Forest Ecology and Management, 417, 265-280.

Blog Post 2: Sources of Scientific Information

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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.