BI 149- Cancer Biology
Research Project Resources

The research paper gives you the opportunity to search outside the primary scientific literature and explore the interdisciplinary dimensions of cancer biology.  The science databases you have searched will still be key to finding reports of biomedical research.  However, you will almost certainly want to supplement these, exploring the secondary literature and, depending on your topic, the primary literature in other fields such as psychology, philosophy, literature, etc.

Where can I find background information?

Resources such as these might help provide you with ideas for research topics:

Cancer topics (National Cancer Institute) http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics 
Learn about cancer (American Cancer Society) http://www.cancer.org/docroot/LRN/LRN_0.asp 
Cancer sourcebook  Ref. RC263 .C294 2003
Medline Plus health topics: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/healthtopics.html 
Access Science (encyclopedia of science & technology) 
Encyclopedia of bioethics Ref. QH332 .E52 1995

 If you need succinct explanations or quick definitions, try:

NCI Dictionary of cancer terms  http://www.cancer.gov/dictionary/ 
Cancer dictionary  Ref. RC262 .A39 2000
Black's medical dictionary  Ref. R121 .B598 2004B
Melloni's illustrated medical dictionary  Ref. R121 .D76 2002
Oxford concise medical dictionary (online)
Medline Plus encyclopedias & dictionaries http://medlineplus.gov/ 

Where can I find books?

Books may provide you with useful information on topics related to cancer biology. To locate books in our library, search the library catalog by keyword ("search everything") or subject. When you find an especially good book listed, use the "view" option to see what subject headings are assigned to it, to locate similar books. Also, check the bibliographies of useful books for additional sources.

Here are some potentially useful subjects to search under as you hunt for books:

Cancer
Tumors
Melanoma
Oncology
Medical ethics
Bioethics  

If the BSC library does not have many books on your research topic, you can try searching WorldCat to see what is available locally or worldwide.  

Where can I find articles?

Start from the library’s indexes & databases page
In addition to the biomedical databases you may have used for your lab report...

→ the following indexes may be especially useful for finding ethical, legal, and social analyses:

Philosopher’s Index (1940-present)
Provides indexing and abstracts from books and journals of philosophy and related fields.  No full text

Humanities FullText and Social Sciences Full Text (both1983-present) 
Each of these Wilson databases indexes more than 350 scholarly English-language periodicals in the humanities and social sciences, respectively.  They also provide access to a useful subset of journal articles as well as some popular sources, many of them full text. 

PsycInfo (1872-present)
Created and maintained by the American Psychological Association, this database is the key source for finding research articles, books, and book chapters in the field of psychology.  A subset of this database (PsycArticles) offers complete full text of 50 psychology journals.

LegalTrac (1988-present)
Indexes law reviews and other legal publications, as well as law-related articles from general interest publications.  Includes full text of many articles.

SIRS Researcher is a full text database providing access to the full text of popular articles on many social and ethical issues. 

→ these databases focus on health & wellness:

Health and Wellness Resource Center - provides access to more than 700 health/medical journals and articles from 2,200 general interest publications, and links to health assessment sites and government databases.

Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition - access to over scholarly full text journals focusing on many medical disciplines

→ The library also subscribes to several general indexes (such as Academic Search Elite, Expanded Academic ASAP, Lexis Nexis Academic, and ProQuest Research Library) that offer the full text of many articles. These indexes cover a mixture of popular and scholarly journals in many fields; evaluate your sources carefully to check what you need! 

Where can I find the full text of articles that sound promising?

You will probably notice that not all of the articles that sound good are available full text in the database you are searching. To see if an article is available full text in another database, or if it's available in print or microfilm format in the Library, please consult Periodicals @ BSC on the Library home page.  If you need an article (or book) that is not available locally, you can use Interlibrary Loan

What about websites?

Use material that is freely available on the Internet very thoughtfully: evaluate, evaluate!  You will undoubtedly find some incredibly valuable resources -- along with questionable or highly biased websites.  Government- and academic-sponsored websites are often especially useful, as are independent research associations.

National Cancer Institute  http://www.cancer.gov/ 
American Cancer Society http://www.cancer.org/ 
American Association for Cancer Research http://www.aacr.org/ 
Cancer Centers (NCI)  http://www3.cancer.gov/cancercenters/centerslist.html 
Many cancer support organizations exist as well (e.g., http://www.cancer-free.com, http://www.rare-cancer.org)  

How do I cite my sources?

Use The Everyday Writer as a good general guide.  This book is available in the Bookstore, in the Library (Ready Ref. PE1408 .L86 2005) and online at http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/everyday_writer/docsource/  

Remember: As you work through the research process,
please feel free to ask the library staff for help at any point.