PHZ 4710: Introduction to Biological Physics: Home

For off-campus access to library-licensed e-Journals, research databases and e-resources, use either the UF VPN or the library proxy.

When you see in your search results, click to access digital full-text material.

Instructions for both methods of access can be found at the link below.

Welcome Biological Physics students! This website will guide you to free and library-subscribed resources that will help you with assignments in this course.

1. Library Catalog: The catalog lists all the items that the library owns or to which it has a subscription. You can search the catalog for a specific book title or author. You can also search for items related to a specific topic or subject. Journal subscriptions are also listed in the catalog, but you will need to use a database to find individual articles in those journals. Links to online books and journals are also contained within the catalog. More information about electronic books is on the Books & E-Books page.
2. About Article Citations: You may come across citations to journal articles as you read background information. Some common citation styles are deciphered for you here, and can help you determine the proper format to use for your own reports.
3. Article Databases: Databases cover different subjects, different journals, and different time periods. It's a good idea to try searching more than one database. Some databases that will be helpful for you in this class can be found on the Physics Databases page. 
4. Off-Campus Access: Use of most electronic library resources (including e-books, e-journals, and databases) is restricted to affiliates of UF. If you're off campus, you will need to use the UF VPN software to access electronic databases, journals and books. If for some reason the VPN cannot be used, use the library proxy.
5. Library Account: You can easily see what books you have checked out, what books you have requested through UBorrow, and renew material online through your account.

Choosing a Topic: The realm of biological physics is big! As suggested in the assignment instructions, narrowing down your topic will help you write a more focused, cogent paper. Using Internet search engines such as Google, and sites such as Wikipedia, can be a good start to finding information and narrowing your topic, but you must be aware of the limitations of each of those services. News sites of scientific organizations and journals is another good way to find out what's going on with current research. We will talk more about this during class.

Smart Searching: Database searching can get overwhelming, which is why we will talk about managing your research using a citation manager to keep your sources organized. If you can narrow your topic using general searching, knowing specific words that describe your topic will be very helpful. You may see these words described as "index terms" or "keywords". These words are learned by (what else) searching and reading the literature. Using these words in conjunction with the proper dtaabase and Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) can markedly increase the relevance of your searches.

Writing an Abstract: For your abstract, it will help IMMENSELY to already have an outline of your paper prepared. Technical paper abstracts are comprised of several 1-2 sentence summaries of each of the major paper sections. For a research paper, for example, the first 2 sentences describe the motivation and background of the work. Next there are a few sentences describing the experimental methods used and the results of the experiments. The final sentences usually describe conclusions drawn from the experiments, their significance, and suggestions for further work. For this assignment, abstracts should be based off an outline of the major sections of  the paper.