This guide is for students in Penn State Harrisburg's BIOL 413 course. It includes databases, research tips, and other resources for various assignments.
Get a comprehensive view of life sciences research, including the most important discoveries, significant influences and relevant connections. The new BIOSIS Citation Index combines the unique BIOSIS content that is critical to life sciences research with powerful citation indexing only the Web of Science™ can provide. You can rely on comprehensive and relevant life sciences coverage that eliminates excess and delivers data that is accurate, meaningful and timely.
Web of Science provides access to: the Science Citation Index Expanded 1900-present; the Social Sciences Citation Index 1956-present; and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index 1975-present. Web of Science indexes articles from thousands of journals and also indexes the citations used in those articles, thus allowing the user to see which papers have cited a core paper, and how many times a paper was cited in a given time period. Covers published content is almost every discipline.
PubMed is a web interface that allows you to search MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine's premier database of citations and abstracts for biomedical research articles. The core subject is medicine, but subject coverage also includes bioethics, biology, chemistry, dentistry, environmental health, genetics, gerontology, health care planning and administration, history of medicine, hospital administration, microbiology, nutrition, nursing (International Nursing Index), physiology, pre-clinical sciences, public health, sports medicine, veterinary medicine and zoology. MEDLINE covers over 4,800 journals published in the United States and 70 other countries. The database contains over 15 million citations dating back to 1950. Coverage is worldwide and updated weekly. Learn more about PubMed at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/about/. or Try the Tutorial at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pubmed_tutorial/m1001.html
Do we have that eJournal?
Browsing both current and archived issues of scholarly journals can be helpful too. Some relevant sources:
Cellular Signaling
Science Signaling
Article Search Tips
Finding the best articles on your topic requires these steps.
Select an appropriate database.
Enter and combine terms appropriate to your topic
Scan the best items on the results list and look for new subject terms or keywords. Then revise your search using these new terms.
Save the journal title, volume, date, and page numbers. This is all part of the "citation".
Explore other databases and subject terms (which vary between databases) for more information.