Biological Sciences

Here are some resources that will help you as you work through your annotated bibliography. 

Citation style for this assignment

You are required to format your references using American Psychological Association (APA) style. For guidance on this style, please consult the APA Style guide from Purdue University. 

AI tools may be cited following APA's guidance for software. APA has also published specific guidance on how to cite ChatGPT.

Zoterobib for easy reference generation

Zoterobib (Zbib) is an online tool for quickly generating references in your preferred style. Just enter an article's DOI, PMID, or title to get a formatted reference that you can copy-paste into your paper. For books, you can enter the ISBN. For other types of resources (software, web sites, etc.), you may need to enter the information manually, and Zbib will format it for you.

Be aware that these programs are not foolproof and you may still need to make corrections. For example, Zbib will convert article titles between title case (all major words capitalized) and sentence case (only the first word and any proper nouns capitalized), depending on what your style calls for. However, it is not good at recognizing proper nouns (personal, company, and geographic names), so you may need to correct these yourself. Zbib will warn you about this. 

Note that if using Zbib or any other citation generator, you'll need to manually fix errors related to genus and species names. Genus is always capitalized, while species is lower-case. For example, the taxonomic name of the house mouse is correctly typed as "Mus musculus", not "Mus Musculus" or "mus musculus." Citation generators may render these names incorrectly, and it is your responsibility to correct them.

Finding Books and Articles

Use the Find Books and Find Journal Articles sections on the left menu for tips on searching for articles and books on animal behaviour. If you're a Google Scholar user, see our instructions for setting up Google Scholar to bypass paywalls and access UofC's fulltext subscriptions.

Need an article we don't have? We can get it from another library, usually in a few days. Click here to request an interlibrary loan.

Recommended journals for animal behaviour research (recommended by Dr. Summers):

• Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 
• Journal of Ecology
• Behavioral Ecology 
• Ethology 
• Animal Behaviour 
• Journal of Experimental Biology
• PLoS ONE 
• Current Biology 
• The Science of Nature (Naturwissenschaften)
• Nature 
• Science
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

The library has several dictionaries and encyclopedias on animal behaviour. Here's a selection of general resources, but you can also try searching your animal (or its general category) and "behavior" in the library search box, then limit to "Books" along the left-hand side. Many of our books are e-books. For an example, see this search on rodent behavior.

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias - specialized dictionaries will give you in-depth definitions of animal behaviour terms, while encyclopedias will provide you with quick overviews that can help you quickly get up to speed on your topic.

• A Dictionary of Animal Behaviour (2006)
• Animal Behavior Desk Reference: A Dictionary of Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Evolution (2011)
• Dictionary of Zoo Biology and Animal Management: A Guide to Terminology used in Zoo Biology, Animal Welfare, Wildlife Conservation and Livestock Production (2013)
• Oxford Bibliography of Evolutionary Biology - offers some concise definitions and topic explanations for some animal behaviours