Something Besides Journals.

While going through some of the reference lists of Dr. Medina's publications, I attempted to explore the other kinds of materials that were referenced along with journals. But lets first briefly talk about what kinds of journals she's using. As was suggested in lecture, Science and Nature tend to be among the most cited journals, followed by quite few discipline and sub-discipline specific journals. I found that my hunch was correct in finding many of the same journal titles that she has published in were also in her reference lists. Now lets get back to the topic at hand. What about the monographs and other resources?

Here some of the monograph titles (The titles were double checked through yahoo.com to make sure they were actually monographs. Surprisingly a few are available at Target.com. I thought this was interesting but will definitely store that in the back of my mind, just in case.)

-Veterinary Epidemiology, Principles and Methods
-Medical Microbiology, 4th edn
-Algae
-Dinoflagellates
-Corals of the World
-Corals in Space and Time: Biogeography and Evolution of the Scleractinia
-The Cnidarians and Their Evolution
-Progress in Cell Research: Symposium on Thirty Years of Progress in Mitochondrial Bioenergetics and Molecular Biology
-Phytophthora Diseases Worldwide
-Coelenterate ecology and behavior
-Multicellular animals:Anew approach to the phylogenetic order in nature

In addition to these, there are other types of resources that Dr. Medina uses. Some are:

-PAUP*: Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony (and Other Methods)
-Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology
-maanova: a software package for the analysis of spotted cDNA microarray experiments. In: The Analysis of Gene Expression Data Methods and Software
-J/MAANOVA User Manual

This sampling shows a bit of the diversity of material formats that scientists, like any other researcher, need to conduct their projects. It shows that not everything can be found in journal articles and proves that books still have great value in the realm of research.

More Questions than Answers.

Today, after viewing another student's blog, I began to search for more popular literature on Dr. Medina to see if I could get a more informal perspective that might help to answer some questions about her, her work, and information seeking behavior. Lexis Nexis Academic database and all various EBSCOhost databases were searched but few results were brought up and none were very informal. Some were articles by other people that had permission to use photos/diagrams accredited to Dr. Medina. (This did bring up an interesting point. If these other authors knew to ask Dr. Medina for these materials they must have a connection, possibly a networking connection, somewhere. Perhaps I will research this a little for a later post.) Going back to the Medina Lab website for some inspiration, I started combing through the "News" section to see if their was any mention of her being featured in any interviews or articles. Low and behold there were about two citations of such articles that look exactly what I what I was hoping for! The problem: they are all in Spanish. I searched the newspapers' website and could not find anywhere to switch languages. Now I did take a couple of years of Spanish in high school but have retained very little beyond a few key conversational phrases. So as I sat feeling frustrated from being thwarted by a language barrier, I began to ask: what do scientists do if they know there is an article out there that is pertinent to their research but they cannot read the language it was written/printed in? I would think this might happen quite often seeing as there seems like there are so many different places where research is conducted, no one could possibly know all of the languages required. So it makes me wonder: do scientists make impromptu friends within the modern language department of their university or university libraries, employ translation services, or possibly just take their skills from a few years of a language, dust them off and try to fight their way through the article, hoping they don't mistranslate and only seek assistance if they determine it is really important?

Interdisciplinary and Sub-discipline Aspects

Just looking at the journal titles in the last post, one quickly realizes that there is a lot of cross discipline and sub-discipline research being performed here. Today, some of the references lists included in Dr. Medina's publications were scanned to see what science literature she explores and cites to get a better grasp of what her information needs were when writing/researching. A "short list" of those branches of science she explored to help in her research is:

• genetics/genomics
• computational biology
• molecular biology/ zoology
  
• zoology/biology/malacology (study of mullusks)
  
• oceanography/ marine biology
• ecology
• behavioral and neural biology/ neurophysiology
  
• biogeography
• paleobiology
• microbiology

Scanning this list, one notices that most of these branches are often closely related and the lines between them can often times be very smudged and gray. Universities tend to incorporate similar fields into a single department making them even closer related. Which, if you think about it, this cross discipline research usually is a good thing. If scientists did not use knowledge from other fields they would most definitely miss something or underestimate a variable's influence. However, this cooperation may make finding proper, pertinent information harder or require more intense research in order to cover all the bases. The researcher must figure out if there is anything they should or "need to know" about the basics before they can utilize specialist's information that is narrow in scope and super specific. This means that they may need broad coverage materials also, to build up a varied background knowledge.

Where is She Publishing?

Using the bibliography of Dr. Medina's journal publications that was mentioned last post (included within the lab's website: http://sequoia.ucmerced.edu/MedinaLab/publications.php) I tried to find out what journals she tended to publish in the most. (These include articles written primarily by her and those for which she is given a lesser credit.) The thought behind this was that those publications she and her colleugues favor for their own articles may be locations that she tends to favor when attempting to keep up to date and informed, as well as, sources for receiving new ideas. (Note: This exercise also gave the author a bit of orientation as to what journals the scientist is familiar with, and widened the author's scope of available scientific sources and those sources pertinent to Dr. Medina's field of science. The shorthand journal titles used in the bibliography sometimes made for an interesting time when trying to figure out the full title, and a little yahoo sleuthing was employed for those that did not have a useable pdf file link. For those with a good pdf, the full journal title was usually found, as most of you will know, along the sides, tops, or bottoms of the journal article pages.)

Below is the tally sheet created:

• 3- Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS)
• 3- Science
• 2- Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology
• 2- Molecular Ecology
• 2- Systematic Biology
• 2- Journal of Experimental Biology
• 2- Marine Biolotechnology
• 1- International Society for Microbial Ecology
• 1- Emerging Infectious Deseases [this one really kind of surprised me actually]
• 1- BMC Genomics
• 1- Molecular Ecology Notes [I checked to see if this was a part of Molecular Ecology, it is not and has undergone a title change. It is now: Molecular Ecology Resources]
• 1- Annales Zoologici Fennici [A Finnish Publication]
• 1- 10th International Coral Reef Symposium [I know, not really a journal but still an important publication]
• 1- Bulletin of Marine Science
• 1- Molecular Biology and Evolution
• 1- International Journal of Astrobiology
• 1- Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution

In addition to these, Dr. Medina lists four book chapters of which she took some part in writing.

How Best To Begin...

I began my search for information on my scientist by searching (using yahoo.com) to see what UC, Merced webpages had her name prominently identified and seemed relevant for finding basic background information. In this search I found a link which led to the website for Dr. Medina's Lab (to be found at http://sequoia.ucmerced.edu/MedinaLab/index.php). This site gives great information about the current events/awards/news of the people involved in the lab, including Dr. Medina herself. The site also provides users with a bibliography of Dr. Medina's publications, as well as, information about current and past research projects that the lab has performed. This is believed to be a great information source requiring further investigating. Some other sites the search brought up were those reporting the awards that were mentioned in the first posting, giving further detail as to why they were awarded and what Dr. Medina hopes to achieve with them.

An Introduction

Dr. Monica Medina is currently an assistant professor within the School of Natural Science at the University of California, Merced. She studies coral-algal symbiosis and has won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2008, in addition to the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation she won in 2007.

This scientist was chosen because of the author's interest in Phycology, having received a B.S. in Plant Biology in 2006 from Ohio University.

This blog is intended to be the documentation of a course project for an MSLS student. The project is intended to facilitate learning what methods scientists use in searching for, discovering, and utilizing information.