Resources on Animal Rights and Animal Welfare SEARCHING THE LITERATURE ONLINE Information on both animal welfare and animal rights is abundant Accessing the Internet and typing a few words in a Google search box retrieves more results than there is time to read Refining a search in order to retrieve fewer but more relevant results requires consideration of both how and where to search The search terms used directly affect retrieved results, no matter where one searches For example, searching by each of the following six terms individually—euthanasia, endpoint, slaughter, sacrifice, kill, or death—will produce six lists with very different results A search using the term vivisection and another using the terms animal research will also retrieve two sets of unique results This is because Google does not interpret what is meant by a term; rather, it searches literally, letter by letter Therefore, the term must be used in the search in order to identify any sites using that same term; consider your search terms carefully The source of the site, the citation, or the information retrieved in the search results are further essential considerations Searchers should review who has posted the resource, and evaluate their qualifications and level of expertise GoogleScholar is one way to limit a search to the scholarly literature, such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and articles from academic publishers, societies, and universities The Advanced Search option is particularly useful in narrowing a search to results that are precise and authoritative The free databases published by the U.S government, PubMed (published by the U.S National Library of Medicine), http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/, and Agricola (published by the National Agricultural Library), http://agricola.nal.usda.gov/, allow users to access research publications in the medical and agricultural fields, respectively Academic and research institutions and libraries subscribe to proprietary databases, such as PsycInfo and Web of Science, which offer additional avenues to search for and locate useful and reliable information Finally, the general resources listed in “Books, Essays, and Organizations” below, as well as the “Further Resources” sections at the ends of the entries in the encyclopedia, provide valuable tools to identify and obtain information of interest Resources for Searching Animal Rights Literature Allen, T., & Jensen, D 2006 Searching bibliographic databases for alternatives Animal Welfare Information Center Bulletin, 12, 1–16 643