Ornithology Reference Searching
Reference Searching for Ornithology


Here are some links and ideas for finding relevant scientific references for your ornithology project.

Survey Methods

For those of you conducting projects with a survey or census, we have placed an Adobe Acrobat version of the reference:
Handbook of Field Methods for Monitoring Landbirds by: John Ralph, Geupel, Geoffrey R.; Pyle, Peter; Martin, Thomas E.; DeSante, David F.
You access the article by visiting the e-reserve page at the library, select the course number, and enter the password. They gave me the password "ecol484" (all lower case), but I could only get in using "mimus", so try both if necessary. You'll need a copy of the Adobe Acrobat software, which is obtainable through the reference page. The reference is stored in three parts; if someone wishes to look through and e-mail me the useful sections, I'll update this link.


Additional information and pointers on monitoring and surveys can be found in a section of the Birdnet site devoted to the topic. They include a page of references on surveys and monitoring.

Library References

One way to search for individual studies is to use the Science Citation Index. The SCI allows searches for topics and gives abstracts of particular articles. You can search for topics (like nesting) or for species. You must enter through the UA system, so it's best to access through this page. Since you have to "reconfigure" your browser to use this, it may be best to do this in the library on their computers.


Other options for searching might be found on the Index/search page of the library, where an article index is available.



One of the best ways to do a thorough search is to go to individual journals in the stacks, and look at the index (available at the end of each volume, corresponding to the end of the year). By looking through several years you can find a lot of useful references, and recent articles will give references for other relevant articles. The nice thing about this method is that when index entries are found, the journal is right there in your hand, so you can take a look at it, read it and take notes, or carry it downstairs to the xerox room.
The most relevant ornithology journals can be found in the Science Library at:

Auk          QL671.A9
The Wilson Bulletin   QL671.W7
The Condor         QL671.C7
The Journal of Field Ornithology   QL677.5.B57
The Ibis         QL671.I3 (Journal of The British Ornith. Soc.)
The Southwestern Naturalist QH1 .S745 (Not specifically Ornithology, but Southwest Natural History, including bird-related articles.


Specific Species references

If your project focuses on one or a few species, and you wish to find references related to that species (or get measurements, such as bill sizes), the best place to look is at the set of species accounts in The Birds of North America : life histories for the 21st century. If the account for that species is available, they are housed in the Science Library Reference Section at QL681 .B57.
The accounts are not in taxonomic order, but rather numbered in the order they were written (entirely random). Most, but not all species are currently available.

Contained in the reference section of the library, and near the accounts is a cumulative index, telling which account number corresponds to a particular species. The cumulative index is also available online at the BNA home site.



Recent Ornithology References

The Ornithological Societies of North America (OSNA) provides an on-line service where journal articles are organized into categories, and sometimes a one-sentence summary is given. They update the listings on a yearly or 6-month basis. These simply give the references listed for a given period, so, for example, the January 2001 listing may include papers published from all of 2000.
You can access the listings for about the past eight years by visiting their Recent Ornithological Literature Online page, and using the search function of your browser ("Edit"- "Find"), you can enter keywords to see if any references are there.


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