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Biology

A guide to books, media, database, and other resources at Ball State University Libraries for researchers in biology. Access the guide directly by using this URL: http://bsu.libguides.com/biology.

Tools (Databases, etc.)

Recommended databases and interfaces (ie aggregators)

Ball State University Libraries provides access to authoritative and accurate sources of information on peer-reviewed and otherwise scholarly publications through the Databases page.  Remember that part of your tuition goes to pay for such resources and services- you do have a subscription to journals like Nature through your status as a student at Ball State.

The Databases pages can be viewed in a couple of different ways. You can look at an A-Z list of all the databases we offer access to or you can choose a subject (e.g. Science or Health) and just look at databases relevant to your field of interest. 

For instance, go to the Databases page and click the Databases by Subject link on the left hand navigation bar. Then click on the Science menu item.  This will bring up only those databases concerned with the hard sciences including mathematics.  Another subject area that may apply to biology researchers would be Health.  Remember: just because it doesn’t say BIOLOGY doesn’t mean it can’t be relevant to what you are doing.  Do not neglect a source because it does not seem to fit your conception of what you want.

Discovery Tools (to begin with):
OneSearch
Web of Science
ScienceDirect
Ingenta Connect

More focused/in depth:
AGRICOLA
Biological Abstracts (will be same interface as Web of Science)
Biological & Agricultural Index Plus
bioRxiv (an open-access, preprint repository)
Medline with Fulltext (other databases simultaneously accessible via EBSCO; also accessible at PubMed)
NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology)
Public Library of Science (PLoS) (an open access publisher)
MathSciNet
JSTOR (over 100 full-text journals on botany, biometry, limnology, ecology, etc.)
SciFindern (chemistry-focused but also covers lots of biomedical sources and accesses Medline)

General Research & Reference:
Oxford Reference Online
Academic Search Complete (an EBSCO database)
Biomedical Medical Collection
Annual Reviews
Science.gov

Other useful tools:
WorldCat
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
Abbreviations.com (find full journal titles from abbreviations)
Worldwide Protein Databank (PDB) (archive of macromolecular structural data that is freely and publicly available to the global community)

(sample DOI for ILL: 10.1016/S1389-0352(00)00005-2)