ANS 219: Introductory Horse Management: Home

Request items from around the world through Interlibrary Loan. Check and request books from I-Share first before requesting books through this service. 

See additional materials in the Handouts box.

1. You may find more information if you use the word horses instead of equine in your searches. For example:
   Horses and metabolic syndrome will retrieve more citations than equine metabolic syndrome
    
2. Use the database's limit to peer-reviewed journals if this option is available.
   • Peer-reviewed journal limiters may also be called Academic Journals (e.g., in CAB) or scholarly journals.
   • PubMed and Medline do not have a specific limiter for peer-reviewed articles, but you may limit to specific types of scientific studies.
   •  See this YouTube video if you want to learn about visual clues to distinguish scholarly articles vs. magazine articles.
   • Check the Handouts box for Jennifer Horton's  "Scholarly, Trade, and Popular Articles," and "Parts of a Scholarly Article" for visual clues and characteristics of different types of articles . 
      
3. You may want to read about your topic in a book, e.g., the Merck Veterinary Manual, to find additional search terms. Sometimes books have lists of references that may lead you to good, peer-reviewed sources.
    
4. If you find a good article for your topic, check the reference list for more sources. t. Contact me if you need help locating the full text of an article.

• Break your topic into the main concepts and use connectors (and, or) for your search:
  What is the treatment for laminitis in horses? --> Horses and laminitis and treatment
   
• Use the word horses rather than equine to expand your search:
  Equine encephalitis --> horses and encephalitis
  Equine metabolic syndrome --> horses and metabolic syndrome
   
• Use synonyms to expand your search and connect them with or:
  " Equine metabolic syndrome" OR "equine syndrome x" OR "peripheral Cushing syndrome" OR "insulin dysregulation syndrome" 
• Link from subjects or descriptors found in article citations to find others.
   
• Use limits, such as language, publication date, and publication type (e.g., scholarly journals or peer-reviewed journals, review articles).

•  Combine searches in Search History.

• Databases produced by the same vendor (for example, CAB, Agricola, PsycINFO, and MEDLINE are in EBSCO) may be searched together.

• Use truncation symbols if available, e.g. pest* will find pest, pests, or pesticides

• Limit to words in the title or abstract to narrow your search

Books and chapters in books can give you an overview on a particular topic.

Search books, journals, government documents, videos, DVDs, etc. by using the Morris Library catalog

You may limit your search to just SIUC, or if you have several days, search All I-Share Libraries and request that materials be sent to the library.

Try these keyword and subject searches:

• Horse breeds
• Horses breeding
• Horses anatomy
• Horses behavior
• Horses management
• Horses diseases
• Horse diseases
• Horses internal medicine

The Journal of Animal Science references format uses standard ISO journal title abbreviations with periods after each abbreviated word in the title. For example, Journal of Animal Science would be abbreviated as J. Anim. Sci. One word titles (e.g., Nature or Theriogenology) are not abbreviated. Some journal citation databases use abbreviations in the citations, but some do not. The sources listed below may contain this information. Here is an example from the NLM Catalog: Journals Referenced in the NCBI Databases resource:

Type your title in the search box.

Notice that the record includes in the NLM Title Abbreviation (do NOT use) and the ISO abbreviation.

The ISO abbreviation for Journal of Equine Veterinary Science is:

J. Equine Vet. Sci.

If you have any problems locating the correct abbreviation for a journal title, please let me know.