>> Getting Started

Having an already established animal rights group is always an advantage, but not necessary. All you need is a few dedicated people willing to make change, although eventually through your campaigning you will need extra people and a group - but this may well develop as a result from campaigning.

• Save documents as you go along, plus where you got them from. This is essential!! If you can access the PDF file, click "Save Copy" and save it into an appropriate folder. It would also be good to compile a Word document listing the title and website address of documents and where each file came from. Then if the University decide to take down documents or make them subscription only, you already have saved copies. It also means you can keep track of what you have looked at, and gives you a compact list of experiments to access easily.

• If you can't directly access documents online - don't worry. Many journals require a paid subscription before you can fully access documents. Read the Abstract and if the experiment looks interesting, write down the journal name, date of publication, volume, and page number. This is always listed on search results anyway, for example: "Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior Volume 84, Issue 2 , June 2006, Pages 353-359". Your University library should have every journal you'd ever want, so you can find it there and photocopy it. Otherwise, certain science departments have their own libraries where all the journals are stocked.

• Remember to look carefully at the departments where the experiment has been conducted, as sometimes the University may only be involved, but the research was carried out elsewhere. If this is the case, just be sure not to claim certain animals are being kept on site at a University when actually they were not. However, the University's involvement in an experiment is still important to bring up.

• Use the different tabs for more results. If nothing has come up in your search, try clicking the other two tabs in the PubMed search engine - Journal of Biology and Biomed Central.

• Eventually, after looking at several papers, you may notice the same authors coming up. These are probably full-time staff at your University who teach and conduct research. Looking up their last name followed by their initials in the "authors" section of the PubMed search, or even typing them into Google, will bring up lists of all their publications, enabling you to find extra documents.

• Remember that not all research papers that come up in the search results will be experiments on animals. Some may just be using DNA or cells from animals. A good way to tell is by looking in the "Methods" section, which will be in the first few pages of the document. If they have used live animals, it is normally made quite clear. For example:

• See where the animals come from. As demonstrated in the above example, the animals have come from a standard supplier. However, for things like rats, mice and guinea pigs, the University may well breed their own colonies. If this is the case, it will be stated as such.

• Note how the animals are killed. Gassing or neck snapping are the main methods for killing laboratory animals. "Cervical dislocation" is the scientific term for snapping the animal's neck.

• Look up unclear words in a medical dictionary. Many of the documents are hard to understand as they detail complex scientific procedures. Clarification can be sought by looking up key words in dictionaries, such as the Medline Medical Dictionary. You may eventually find science students or researchers, as we do, who are against the experiments and will help you to break down the documents.