Microbiology - Food microbiology (Nov/22/2007 )

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone could help me regarding a microbiology assignment. I am confused and need some guidance as to what to do next. Details of the assignment below:

Q)Describe, how food poisoning bacteria are able to survive and proliferate in foods.

Taking in to account the following factors
•The influential factors within foods which influence the growth and survival of microorganisms.
• Relate these factors to the growth of specific food borne bacterial pathogens
•Use information from journals (at least five references published within four years) to
Effectively explain the relationship of environmental factors and the growth of specific
Food borne bacterial pathogens.


Now I have been asked to reference my work using journals, so far I have identified 4 journals:

1)Letters in applied microbiology (2003)
2)Journal of applied microbiology (2005)
3)Applied and environmental microbiology (2006)
4)Microbiology (2007)

So far I have identified the influential factors which influence the growth and survival of microorganisms.

Any help will be appreciated on this topic, or if anyone is familiar with the journals I have mentioned. Thanks in advance to anyone who replies.

Please forgive me if you already know the following but from your post it doesn't sound like you have been taught this properly:

You can't reference an entire journal, as each issue is made up of a variety of papers published by several authors on many different subjects.

The way you should approach your research is as follows:
-rather than searching for a journal and then trying to find the information you are after you should search for the information itself

ie. go to a literature search engine such as PubMed ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez ) and type in some keywords for the type of thing you are interested in. A list of publications will then appear and you can sift through these to find any that are relevant to your topic.

A really good place to start would be to read some review articles, and then select a few references from these to follow up in further detail. But it is not advisable to use the review articles themselves as references, you should only ever cite information from the original source.

So hopefully that wasn't all "no duh" to you, and now you are thinking I'm some sort of idiot

Good luck with your assignment