Getting Started
Think of this course guide as a 'library menu' of resources and services to help you with NUT 120AN. Like a menu, this course guide is there for you to refer to when you need it – some things you may already use or are your favorite resources; others are new things to explore. Like a menu, you can pick and choose what you want to use – you don’t have to “consume” everything. Instead of exploring food and drink on your 'library menu,' you will be exploring the culture of the library: its systems, terminology, and how to find/use key published resources for your topics.
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Nutritional Topic Ideas and Search Terms
Useful sources for finding recent research in all sciences, where you might find interesting topics, are the weekly magazines Science News and New Scientist. In addition, the premier journals SCIENCE and NATURE include the latest innovative research across the sciences. Nutrition journals which publish articles on nutritional anthropology include Ecology of Food and Nutrition and Journal of Nutrition Education (now titled Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior) which are both indexed in the CAB Abstracts database.
With your assigned group topic, you will need to think of search terms to use for locating articles and other publications. Search the UC Davis Library online catalog (for books, documentaries and more) and use the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and also (for books owned at the Blaisdell Medical Library) the National Library of Medicine (NLM) terms. Each library subject database also has subject lists/thesauri that can help you precisely search your topic, e.g CAB Abstracts has CABICODES and the CAB Thesaurus and BIOSIS Previews has Concept Codes, PubMed has MeSH, and more.
Key Resources for NUT 120AN
Before diving into your topic, locating some background information on the topic can be very helpful in refining your question. Try these book and reference resources to better develop your personal knowledge on a topic.
See the books/ebooks section for suggestions of terms for UCD Library Catalog searching.
- Advanced Search: UC Davis Library CatalogSearch UC Library Search for books, journals (not articles) and other materials available online or in the library.
- NUTRITIONnetBASEOver 400 books encompassing “Hundreds of case studies, clinical trials, and biochemical analyses expose the hottest research areas in nutrition. This collection features essential information on phytonutrients, the cancer–diet connection, oxidative stress, mitochondrial function, sports nutrition, and hormonal imbalances.”
- Food Studies Online This link opens in a new window
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Provides researchers rich archival content, visual ephemera, monographs, and videos that explore how food shapes the world around us. Incorporates more than 250 videos and more than 7,000 books and documents. Featured collections include: Food Movements, Organic Farming and GMOs, Food Systems, Food and the Environment, and Diet Trends. Also includes: Small Farms Interview collection, archival photographs, and over 23,000 menus available online through the New York Public Library and Los Angeles Public Library websites.
[Coverage: 1940s -1960s] - CAB eBooks This link opens in a new window
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CABI ebooks provides access to over 1,200 titles in the areas of: Agriculture, Forestry and Food; Veterinary and Animal Sciences; Environmental and Natural Sciences; Plant Sciences; Human Health; Biotechnology, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics and Techniques; Natural, Medicinal and Industrial End-products; Economics and Social Sciences; and Tourism, Hospitality, and Travel. Note: This collection includes a majority of titles published by CAB, but not all titles. In particular, the publisher has chosen not to include textbooks in this package.
[Coverage: 2000-present]
- Wageningen Academic Publishers eBooksUC Davis has current years of eBooks licensed from this large university publisher of agriculture-related books. “Wageningen Academic Publishers is an independent STM publisher operating worldwide in the field of Life Sciences. Located at the heart of one of the world’s most famous food & agriculture research centres, we focus on topics in Animal and Veterinary, Food and Health, Agribusiness and Rural Studies, Agriculture and Environment. We currently publish ... around 30 new books per year.” Exclusions: textbooks
After doing some background research, dive into your summary topic with these core databases (see databases section for a wider selection of databases).
- CAB Abstracts (Ovid) This link opens in a new window
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Provides citations and abstracts to the international agricultural literature, including veterinary medicine, human and animal nutrition, forestry, rural development, as well as other related topics such as tourism and human ecology. Covers over 11,000 journals and conference proceedings and selected books in agriculture. Produced by CAB (Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux) International (CABI) with more than 10 million records. HISTORICAL SCOPE: Archive abstracts added in August 2005 go back to 1910 with 1,860,000 additional records. CAB DATABASE PDFs: As of January 2009, hard-to-find literature may be available as CAB Database PDFs (so noted below the UC-eLinks button). These CABI Full Text items give users automatic access to over 350,000 journal articles, conference papers and reports 80 percent of which are not available electronically anywhere else. NOTE: the default UCD Search Type is set to Advanced Ovid Search.
[Coverage: 1910-present] - BIOSIS Previews This link opens in a new windowBIOSIS Previews is a database for researching the biological sciences literature. Designed by biologists for keeping up with the literature across pure and applied life sciences including agriculture and medicine. Excellent features for searching by taxonomic categories and broad concept codes (subject categories). More than 27 million records in all life science areas, including agriculture, biochemistry, biomedicine, biotechnology, ecology, environmental biology, genetics, microbiology, plant biology, veterinary medicine & pharmacology, and zoology. Indexes over 6,000 journals, serials, books and book chapters, conference proceedings and patents.
[Coverage: 1926-present] - PubMed for UC Davis This link opens in a new windowPubMed for UC Davis offers users vastly more full-text articles than does the public version of Pubmed.gov. Search results in the UCD version display "Get it at UC" buttons providing (with on-campus or VPN connection) access to articles in journals licensed by UC Davis or enabling patrons to request articles that are not immediately available online. PubMed comprises over 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources. PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
[Coverage: 1902-present]
