Example BIOSIS Search
•? B 5
•       02jun03 01:29:18 User556323 Session D2.1
•            $0.00    0.241 DialUnits FileHomeBase
•     $0.00  Estimated cost FileHomeBase
•     $0.02  INTERNET
•     $0.02  Estimated cost this search
•     $0.02  Estimated total session cost   0.241 DialUnits
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•File   5:Biosis Previews(R)  1969-2003/May W4
•       (c) 2002 BIOSIS
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•      Set  Items  Description
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Let’s run through a search in the BIOSIS database.  When I got out of library school, my first position was at the Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina.  The biology program at “The USC” had a great relationship with the Riverbanks Zoo – a very nice natural habitat design was employed at the zoo.  Students would be given behavioral assignments where they’d have to study the behavior of one of the zoo’s residents.  One possibility would be the preening behavior of the birds at the zoo.  Let’s take the mallard as an example.  Well, we’d probably want to read about mallards a bit in our preparation.  At Carnegie Mellon I happened to have ready access to Access Science (the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology online) and Britannica Online.  From the articles, I can surmise that I’d want to use the scientific name for the mallard – Anas platyrhynchos.  Neither of the encyclopedia articles touched on the topic of preening within the articles on mallards.  I looked up preening in both sources as well.  My gut feeling is go with just preening and its variant word endings.

So, I start my search in the Biosis Previews® database …