Subject guide: biology

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Find articles via library databases

• PubMed/Medline
  The premier index for research in biomedical science. Medline help is available online and in print. Use this page to find the best search terms.
• SCOPUS
  An excellent tool that provides science and engineering abstracts. Use the interactive tutorials to learn time-saving tips and tricks. Scopus provides citation tracking, thus allowing you to view the abstracts for all articles cited in a given paper, as well as abstracts for all the articles citing a given paper.
• Agricola
  Index to the U.S. National Agricultural Library. Links to full-text where available. Coverage includes animal, plant, and veterinary sciences; forestry; aquaculture and farming; agricultural economics; cooperative extensions; nutrition; and earth and environmental sciences.
• JSTOR
  Full-text historical archive of important scholarly science journals. Lacks the most recent 2-5 years’ worth of content depending on the journal.

Find articles via open access archives

• BioMed Central
  Independent publishing house committed to providing immediate open access to peer-reviewed biomedical research.
• Directory of Open Access Journals
  Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. Aims to cover all subjects and languages .
• HighWire Press
  Stanford University Libraries maintains this online repository of peer-reviewed journals and scholarly content. Not all of the HighWire journals are free, but many are.
• Public Library of Science
  The Public Library of Science makes scientific and medical literature freely available. Publishes PLoS Biology, PLoS Clinical Trials, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Medicine, and PLoS Pathogens.
• PubMed Central
  U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.

Find review articles

Review articles summarize current research in a given topic and are a good place to begin a literature review.

Find reviews in Medline by using Review [pt] as a search term.
Find reviews in SCOPUS by using DOCTYPE (re) as a search term.

Off-campus access to these databases is easy. When prompted, sign in with your SMU network/email user name and password. For problems, call 360.486.8803 or email us.

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Find books

• Use the O'Grady Library catalog to find books.
• Use Summit to find books that the O'Grady Library doesn't own.
• Use ILLiad to request books that neither O'Grady Library or Summit owns.

Browse the O'Grady bookshelves online.

Background information

• Find A Short Guide to Writing About Biology (Pechenik)
• Access Science

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Websites

The Boston University Science and Engineering Library has an excellent introduction to scientific literature and provides lists of the most highly regarded journals in the fields of molecular biology, microbiology and genetics and environmental sciences and plant biology.