3 Sources I Use to Track Down Elusive Plant-Related Journal Papers — Historical and Contemporary
As someone without current institutional access to journals.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- Introduction
- 1) Google Scholar
- 2) Sci-Hub
- 3) Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Wrap-Up/Conclusion
INTRODUCTION
I love reading through scientific literature about anything plant-related — it is something I have spent copious amounts of time doing over the past few years between a master’s program, work, personal projects, and being a genuine hobby at this point. Throughout undergrad, I remember being afraid to read old literature in case I filled my brain with obsolete information and ultimately failed to sift through the minutiae and learn the right stuff. This was somewhat ironic considering I originally entered undergrad with the intention to double major in history and German with the ultimate goal to archaeology. Though, I was much less hesitant to read old papers when it came to relevant publications for the work in the orchid conservation lab I had joined.
In the orchid conservation world, it’s pretty typical to cite publications from 40–50+ years ago (can you believe 50 years ago was 1974?!). I note this since the rapid speed of innovation and change in other fields may mean that 5–10 year old publications are already considered to be out of date. Until a previous position I held, I still tended to focus on the most recent papers and only a handful of relevant older ones. The nature of the former position required me to explore and develop tissue culture (TC) protocols for many rare/endangered species that had rarely been studied and/or never attempted in TC. This suddenly sent me on a rampage spanning well over a century+ years of literature to try to glean what I may to help create optimal conditions for these in vitro cultures.
And…I ran into many issues acquiring information. On one hand, the literature may have been behind paywalls. On the other hand, the information often was not easily available even when citations were. And that is the purpose of this article — to show you 3 sources I use to track down old literature along with screenshots to show how to navigate them.
(As an aside, if you have never spent time using journal articles for your work, you may not even know how to decide what literature is actually relevant to your needs. This is a topic that would do well for a future article, but right now I will simply note that picking one paper that appears to match the topic of your needs and reviewing their reference section is a great way to track down additional relevant papers — depending upon your topic and why the author(s) had cited the source in the first place. It can easily become a rabbit hole journey full of tangents as your brain starts to piece together information!)
1) GOOGLE SCHOLAR
Beyond all other databases (e.g. EBSCO, Academic Search Complete, PLoS, etc…), I have found Google Scholar to be one I use the most by far — even when I still had institutional access to other databases.
Here is a walkthrough for seeking out a paper on the topic of abscisic acid in Cypripedium formosanum seeds:
Step 1: type “abscisic acid and Cypripedium formosanum seed” into the search bar:
If you are simply seeking out a topic, then now you can simply start scrolling through the results to see if any of the titles and little blipits catch your attention. However, let’s create a new scenario now. Say you know that a paper exists on this topic and it would have been published sometime between 2005–2010, but you don’t know the paper’s title nor the authors. In this case, you can use the “Custom range…” option to narrow things down.
As you can see from the screenshot above, I entered the date ranges and now my output has changed. I included 4 results in the screenshot because I want to point out that Google Scholar is an amazing resource for finding you papers that may be useful along with their citations…but you may not always be able to obtain a readable PDF via Google Scholar as paywalled articles still remain inaccessible — to be discussed in the next source I use. But, before we do that I want to show how to take a citation:
As circled above, all you need to do is click on the “Cite” button under the publication. I personally use “RefMan” to download the citation and then upload it to Mendeley as my reference manager. It easily imports and saves me a ton of work.
2) SCI-HUB
Sci-Hub is a source that has been met with a lot of contention and questions regarding the ethics of using it. This is because the creator of Sci-Hub, Elbakyan, created Sci-Hub with the goal to overcome the barriers to accessing scientific literature that pay-walling articles create for those who cannot afford to purchase them.
Here is the “About” page from the site:
I was introduced to Sci-Hub (unofficially) during my master’s and I will neither say to use it nor not use it. I am simply noting it’s existence and showing an example of its use. I will note that I have managed to locate out of copyright papers on Sci-Hub that I could find nowhere else. A full citation, doi, or just the publication title are all means by which to pull a reference — though you may find a need to try multiple methods. Though, of course, not all papers are available on this platform.
For example, I will use the following reference:
Knudson, L. (1922). Nonsymbiotic germination of orchid seeds. Botanical gazette, 73(1), 1–25.
The result:
Now, I will rerun the search with just the publication title:
The result:
As you can see, in this particular case a full citation did not work — but, the publication title did work. Now the PDF can be either downloaded or printed if desired. I also want to note, you can see to the left of the first screenshot above that the doi number showed up under the save button.
Now, especially for modern and more well known older literature, Google Scholar and Sci-Hub can access a large portion of desired publications. However…some older and lesser known papers (particularly pre-1900s) can be very difficult to track down. This leads me to the 3rd and final source I will be sharing in this article.
3) BIODIVERSITY HERITAGE LIBRARY
The Biodiversity Heritage Library website has been a godsend for my ability to track down old German journals containing publications I can find nowhere else. Let me show you a quick walk-through of how I approach my searches, starting with this publication:
Schneider, A. (1892). Observations on some American rhizobia. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 19(7), 203–218.
Schneider cited one Albert Bernhard Frank (often goes by B Frank in his papers), a scientist of whom I have developed a very particular fascination due to findings that appear to be well before his time in many way. I was able to use the following reference section to start me along my search:
Compared to the much more extensive citation style we use today, these are pretty short and abbreviated citations. For example, the “Ber. d. Deutsch. Bot. Ges, DATE, Heft #” all refer to the journal name, year, and volume in which Frank’s cited works appeared. This particular journal abbreviation has been easier to determine compared to others — some of the abbreviations have been the bane of my existence. Why is that? That is because many of these journals have been defunct for decades and so search engines struggle to help determine what they are.
For the continuing example, let’s use “Ber. d. Deutsch. Bot. Ges, 1890, Heft 8” for finding our publication. The very first thing I do is to simply run a general Google search to see what comes up from the abbreviated journal name:
You should notice from the image above that the very first result happen to be from the Biodiversity Heritage Library webpage and it has noted that our journal appears to be “Berichte der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft.” Click on this result to go the webpage.
This brings us to a page specifically targeting the journal with the abbreviated title varients. Note on the right hand side that the different volumes/years are available via drop-down menus.
We are seeking out volume 8 from 1890, so go ahead and scroll down and open the drop-down.
Here you can see a couple of citation download options alongside other download options. Before I show you how the download PDf option looks (I only ever click the PDF download), I will show you the “View Volume” result:
I personally don’t like using the “View Volume” as I am seeking to download and make PDF’s of the specific journal articles to attach to my Mendeley references. However, this can be an easier and quicker way to search through the journal if you are seeking specific key words and/or don’t wish to download the full journal.
Rather than going back to previous page, you can simply click on the “Download Contents” dropdown menu and then “Download Book” (or select pages) if you wish to download after viewing the full volume.
If you click the “Download Book” option, this will pop up:
As stated previously, I personally always pick the PDF option. Now, why would you maybe not want to download the entire book?
Well…the journals can be quite long (here, 714 — but I’ve had quite a few that are well over a thousand pages).
Sometimes, especially if the old reference is cited in a more modern publication, the pages that our desired paper is printed on may be noted. However, that is not the case from Schneider’s reference list. And so, we must go digging with search functions.
“Frank” is much too common of a word to use along — it is itself an adjective and can be turned into an adverb (“frankly”) or be the first part of another word (“Frankfurt”). So, I recall that Albert Bernhard Frank often goes by B. Frank in his writings, and so I will use “B. Frank” as my search term:
My second search result brought me to his publication! Now I just simply need to check for the page range of his article to print as a PDF and upload it to my Mendeley reference. Which…brings up one more note. I personally use Google Scholar to generate all of my references…which means that I now need to take the title of this paper to enter into Google Scholar to generate my citation.
And, if you note below — only the reference is available on Google Scholar, NOT a PDF.
WRAP-UP
And here we are! The three sources I have walked you through are Google Scholar, Sci-Hub, and Biodiversity Heritage Library. I hope the sources and screenshots prove useful to you! The latter is my most favourite these days as I’ve spent many hours diving into these old German publications now as part of writing projects I have going.
(Keep in mind, not all old publications exist online — so you may need to seek out libraries at universities or botanic gardens to help gain access/direction. Additionally, for some articles you may need to directly contact the author to ask if they might be willing to share a copy with you. And finally, some articles will simply be inaccessible without pay.)
Now off to you — what are your go-to databases you use for your work?
