Subject Guides: BIOL 1027: Honors Biology: Search Tips

Suggested Databases

***In order to gain full access to articles, be sure to use the links on this course guide or log in through the AU Libraries website***

Web of Science This link opens in a new window Web of Science is the online version of the print and CD-ROM versions of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & humanities citation index; Science citation index (called Science citation index expanded, in online version); and, Social sciences citation index. (5 simultaneous users)
Zoological Record This link opens in a new window Equivalent of the printed Zoological record. Covers worldwide systematic zoological literature and other areas of zoology such as anatomy, morphology, physiology, reproduction, ecology, evolution, life history, and behavior. Coverage is from 1864 to the present.
Biosis Citation Index This link opens in a new window An index with abstracts to periodicals in biology and the life sciences. Provides access to biological and medical research findings, clinical studies, and discoveries of new organisms. Coverage is international, and includes agriculture, biochemistry, biomedicine, biotechnology, genetics, botany, ecology, microbiology, pharmacology, and zoology. (10 simultaneous users)
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window Provides access to much of the world's scholarly literature from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities. Results include peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports, and scholarly articles available on the Web.

Bibliography Mining & Cited References Searching

Arts & Humanities Citation Index This link opens in a new window Arts & Humanities Citation Index is a multidisciplinary database covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities. It indexes 1,144 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals, as well as covering individually selected, relevant items from over 6,800 major science and social science journals.

You need to find a lot of articles for this project! One method for finding them is to examine the bibliographies of helpful/important sources you find. hen you can look for items that cited that article. Besides just looking at the bibliography and then searching the library catalog (sometimes the only way to do it), here are a few shortcuts that can help:

Google Scholar
Google Scholar also has a Times Cited feature and is more inclusive of types of information than Google Scholar. Not only scholarly articles (and select books), it has books, book chapters, theses & dissertations, and sometimes even government documents. It also has a Relevant Articles feature. One drawback is that it does have links to bibliographies.
A few other databases...
Like Biological Abstracts and Zoological Record Plus also have some combination of these features.

Using Boolean Operators

Boolean operators are terms used in logic to describe relationships between items. Understanding how they work is critical to successful database searching.

AND only returns search results that contain both keywords

OR returns results that include either keyword

NOT excludes one or more of your keywords