![Kish, William [Biol]](http://blogs.longwood.edu/williamkish/files/2019/10/cropped-Buffalo-creek.jpg)
Prior to college, the only type of scientific writing I was aware of was journal articles. Through all my biology courses, I was introduced to scientific literature like peer reviewed papers, articles, and journals. It was not until my biology 288 that I experienced the type of writing called a literature review. I have written many literature reviews since then, most notably from my BIOL 288 Sophomore Seminar, BIOL 371 Ornithology, and BIOL 455 Wetlands Seminar courses.
In my BIOL 288, BIOL 371, and BIOL 455 courses, I had to chose a topic that would be able to be addressed through scientific literature. In my BIOL 455 course, it had to be related to wetlands and since I was currently studying vernal pools, I chose vernal pools. I also selected vernal pools as my topic for my BIOL 288 course. In my BIOL 371 course, I was able to choose from a variety of topics and I chose how brood parasitism is affecting North American song birds. For these three courses, I used a variety of methods to find scientific literature including google scholar, the Greenwood library, and the web of science. I found a variety of sources that were related to my topic and helped answer my thesis. What often made the search for literature hard was sometimes not knowing what to look up or lack of information on that topic. To combat this issue, I would often make lists of potential key words and phrases that I could look up that would aid in my search for literature.
These three courses showed me that research is broader than just experiments, through the use of different sources and forms of writing, literature reviews could be just as ground breaking as normal experiments. These courses helped me expand my scientific writing skills and allowed me to learn how to look critically into data and other literature and to create my own conclusions for my own writing.
Below is my literature review on vernal pools from BIOL 288.
Below is my term paper from BIOL 371 Ornithology where I examined the literature on the effects of brood parasitism on North American song birds.
Below is my term paper from BIOL 455 Wetlands Seminar on natural and created vernal pools and how they compared in terms of community and physio-chemistry.