Archer Library: Biology: Finding Articles

Obtaining a Known Journal Article

If you have enough information (as is found in a bibliographic citation) to identify an article, follow these steps to obtain the full text.

Often, the article can be found by entering the title in Quick Find, in Simple Search mode.
In Quick Find, click on e-Journal Titles and enter the title of the journal or the ISBN. If the title of the journal appears, follow the Online access link and then use the article's bibliographic information (year, volume, issue) to find it.
Look up the journal by title of the journal in Quick Find, in Advanced Search mode. When you do the search, set the Material Type to Journals. If the title of the journal appears, follow the Online access link to access the journal; or, for an older issue, you might see a call number for the print journal. This is the most reliable method of finding an article.
If the library doesn't have the journal, or doesn't have the issue that you need, you can order the article through Interlibrary Loan.

Finding Articles on a Topic

You can search for articles on a topic by searching bibliographic databases.

Bibliographic databases fall into two categories:

Publisher databases are databases produced by publishers as a way to deliver their content. They have the advantage that newly-published content appears immediately. They have the disadvantage that they contain only content from a particular publisher.
Non-publisher databases contain content from many different publishers. They have the inverse advantage and disadvantage: They have content from many publishers, but there may be a time lag (usually slight) from when articles are published to when they appear in the database.

Best Bets for Biology

Non-publisher databases:

Web of Science (OFF CAMPUS ACCESS)
Web of Science indexes over 8,000 international journals in the sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. Additionally, this database allows you to learn who has cited a particular article, and also offers navigation to electronic full-text journal articles.

This major comprehensive science database, contains different sections that can be searched individually or all together. The sections are:
     Web of Science Core Collection
     BIOSOS Citation Index
     BIOSIS Previews
     KCI-Korean Journal Database
     Medline
     Russian Science Citation Index
     SciELO Citation Index (Open-access articles published in Latin America, Spain, Portugal, and South Africa)

Medline (Available in three interfaces)—A huge biomedical database containing mostly journal articles.

Medline (OCLC)
Covers all areas of medicine, including clinical medicine, experimental medicine, dentistry, nursing, health services administration, and nutrition.
Medline (Ovid)
MEDLINE provides access to over 23 million of the latest bibliographic citations and author abstracts from more than 5,600 biomedicine and life sciences journals in nearly 40 languages (60 languages for older journals). English abstracts are included in more than 80% of the records and the database is updated daily.
Covers all areas of medicine, including clinical medicine, experimental medicine, dentistry, nursing, health services administration, and nutrition.
PubMed
An index to international journals, covering all areas of medicine.
Use this customized PubMed link if you are an URegina student, faculty or staff to see "University of Regina" links to full text on the PubMed interface or set up filters in My NCBI free account. Instructions for NCBI account

Preprints:

bioRχiv—Preprints of articles in all areas of biology.
PeerJ Preprints—Biomedical preprints.
Quantitative Biology—Part of the arXiv preprint server.
Biological Physics—Recent additions of a biological nature to the Physics section of the arXiv preprint server.

Publisher databases:

Science Direct
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Over 1800 full-text journals from Elsevier Science. Major subject areas: biology, biochemistry, chemistry, computer science, business, economics, engineering, environment, earth sciences, medicine, mathematics, physics, and psychology. The University of Regina Library has a current license to access the full text of over 1800 of the journal titles back to 1995 (1993 for Academic Press titles) as well as access to several subject backfile collections with coverage from volume 1, issue 1. Selected books are also available.

Also Useful

Non-publisher databases:

Google Scholar
Not all materials listed in Google Scholar are freely available, however,Google Scholar allows linking to the University of Regina Library subscriptions.
If you are on campus, Google Scholar recognizes your location and automatically shows you the link to the library materials: GetIt@UReginaLibrary.
If you are off campus you must add the University of Regina collection in your Google Scholar settings. For information on how this is done see the Instructions

Publisher databases:

Wiley Online Library
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Online Library hosts the multidisciplinary collection of online resources covering life, health and physical sciences, social science, and the humanities. Includes selected backfiles.