Curated abstract and citation database, updated daily with enriched data and linked scholarly content for Health, Life, Physical, and Social Sciences. Worldwide peer-reviewed literature includes scientific journals, books, and conference proceedings.
The world’s largest index to literature on wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Coverage includes more than 1.6 million bibliographic records many of which include abstracts. Major topic areas include studies of individual species, habitat types, hunting, economics, wildlife behavior, management techniques, diseases, ecotourism, zoology, taxonomy and much more. Approximately 18,000 records are added per year.
SORA is the world's first and largest open access ornithological publications archive. It provides access to an extensive library of ornithological literature of international scope, and detailed material documenting the history of ornithology in North America over the last 120 years. SORA users can both browse and search through journal titles, and individual articles can be downloaded as PDF files.
Books:
Your search will cover McGill's entire collection of resources: books, journals, articles, and other resources, in both print or electronic format.
Or you can come to the library and check the shelves for QL671-699.
Great resource, print only. 17-volume handbook that covers all birds of the world. It is available downtown, but you can request a specific volume to be sent to Mac. Check "View description" to see which volume to request.
Ornithology by F. B. Gill, R. O. Prum, S. K. Robinson
Call Number: QL673 G515 2019
Publication Date: 2019
Comprehensive introductory text covering a wide scope of topics essential for understanding the field of ornithology.
This section includes 4 short videos that explain the basic search process, from how to find a database related to your field to how to create more complex search queries. A written summary is given next to each video. If you need help with your research, don't hesitate to contact your liaison librarian, she is there to help!
This video will show you how to locate and access databases using McGill's catalogue, Databases A-Z and the subject guides.
1. Formulate a specific research question.
For example, "Which methods of biological control are effective on invasive ladybug species?"
2. Identify the main concepts.
In our question, the main concepts would be "biological control", "invasive" and "ladybug".
3. Brainstorm synonyms and related terms for each of your concepts. For "ladybug", we could have "coccinellidae", "ladybird" and "lady beetle".
It’s important to find related terms to obtain more relevant results. If we search only “ladybug”, we may miss articles that are relevant but that have used a different term instead, like “ladybird”.
Boolean operators are used to narrow or broaden your search.
AND: results include all keywords (used to narrow a search)
Example: bee AND neonicotinoids AND monsanto
Search results will contain all three terms.
OR: results include any or all keywords (used to broaden a search)
Example: ladybug OR ladybird
Search results will contain any of these terms.
NOT: results ignore a keyword (used to narrow a search)
Example: Turkey NOT Thanksgiving
Search results will exclude articles containing Thanksgiving.
Truncation (*): used to search variations on a word stem.
Example: Canad*
Search results will include Canada, Canadian, Canadians.
Be careful with truncation as it may yield results that contain unrelated words. Example: leg*
Search results will include leg, legs, legging, legal, legalized, etc.
Phrase searching (“”): used to search for an exact phrase or a concept containing more than one word.
Example: “climate change”
Search results will include the exact phrase, with the keywords next to each other and in the order they are typed.
Climate change (without quotation marks) will be searched as separate keywords.
Parentheses (): used to control the order in which Boolean operators are resolved. Operations within parentheses are resolved first followed by those outside the parentheses.