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BIOL 313 - Principles of Ecology

This is your guide to conducting background research for your project, managing your data, and writing up your results in way that ensures academic integrity and avoids plagiarism.

Books, Book Chapters, and Reference Works (Dictionaries and Encyclopedias)

Need a general overview of your topic? A book is a better place to start than an article, since articles tend to be about narrow, specific things. No time to read a whole book? No worries! Our library web site allows you to focus your search to book chapters too! And we also have a lot of reference works (dictionaries, encyclopdias) that can give you definitions or topic summaries. 

To search for books or book chapters, simply enter topic keywords into the main library website search box. On the results page, you can limit to Books or Book Chapters on the filter menu at the left. Here's a video demo of how to filter for books and book chapters.

Reference works, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, are a useful sources of authoritative definitions and quick background information. While some of this can be found on Wikipedia, the benefit of consulting a specialized dictionary or encyclopedia is that these are written by experts in the field, and are more authoritative. These are good to consult if you need a reference or some factual information that you can cite. Here's a video demo of how to find this type of information.

Looking for a book we don't have? Submit an interlibrary loan request (under Services on the library home page), and we'll borrow it from another library.

Pro tip: if you only need a chapter from a book, request the chapter instead of the book. Copyright laws allow other libraries to scan and send a single chapter, so you'll get it sooner. If you need the whole book, factor in time for it to be mailed to us.

Consult the books below if you are looking for definitions (dictionaries) or brief overviews of concepts in ecology.

Google Book Search

Google Books goes deeper than the library web site, and searches the actual full text of the books. Useful for finding relevant content inside books. Copyright prevents the entire book from being displayed, but you can see "snippets" that help you decide whether you want to search the UofC Library for the book.