Research Log Entry

1. The main subject of my question is Yangtze River.
2. The subject guides I identified were Environmental Sciences and Geology and Environmental studies.

1. I chose JSTOR as my first database.
2. I used the terms "Yangtze" "River" and "contamin*"
3. I retrieved 119 results.
4. I started my search as usual with just the term Yangtze River. This gave me around 3000 results so I had to narrow it down. I added contamin* to my search and it brought down my results to a more reasonable 119.
5. I read the titles and short descriptions to determine if the results were good
6. I chose the article Changzhou, China: Water Supply, Sewage Treatment and Waste Disposal Strategies for Sustainable Development Changzhou
Author: Yang Yaliang
Copyright: 1996
Publisher: Allen Press on behalf of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/4314428
7. For this particular article, I mainly looked at the content to determine if it was meaningful. I also payed attention on the intent of the author. The author seemed to write in an informative way which was a good thing. The year of publication was an indication that the article was fairly recent.


1. For my second search I used the database LexisNexis
2. I used the terms "Yangtze" "River" and "toxi*"
3. I retrieved 75 results.
4. N/a
5. I looked at the title, source, and word count of the list of articles to determine their meaningfulness.
6. The title of the article I chose was Yangtze River blue algae bloom affects drinking water, fish supplies
Author: no specific author, Chinese news agency Xinhua
Published: June 20, 2008
7. This particular article was recent. There was some skepticism on my part because this article was written by a newspaper in China. Knowing that the Chinese government censors some of its information, this article might be biased. The content was short, but it addressed a lot of areas in my topic. It was able to give a cycle type of picture of the pollution process. For example, phosphorus would be released by businesses. These phosphorus would cause blue algae to thrive and multiple which would result in a water that is not safe for humans.