Biology

Most of the time, if you’re accessing Google Scholar on campus, it will be configured to point at University Libraries resources as well as being Find It @BALL STATE-enabled. If not, or you want to set up your own computer to have this same functionality, read through this helpful page from University of Oregon about how to set up Google Scholar to access Ball State University Libraries' databases.

“Find It @ BALL STATE-enabled” means that Google Scholar, Biological Abstracts, or whatever database you might be using has been connected to “link resolver” software that will search all the databases in a specified list for full-text versions of articles you may find in sources that do not offer full-text or for items in databases for which we have no subscription. 

Currently, you can activate this Find It @ BALL STATE link-resolver by clicking the Find It @ BALL STATE button (seen above) or link beside or beneath article/book citations. Find It @ BALL STATE-enabled databases will also be indicated on the Databases list with a small icon.

On occasion, Find It @ BALL STATE will not be able to find a full-text version of your article but it will give you the option for requesting it via our ILL services (see the Interlibrary Loan subtab under the Research/Library Resources tab).

For more information, consult the LibKey Nomad LibGuide.

Another method for finding full-text versions of articles is to use the Citation Linker application powered by Find It @ BALL STATE.  You can find it in the upper right hand corner of OneSearch (see below).

Once you have a citation for an article you want, simply fill in the fields in the Citation Linker and click It will then do the same thing as Find It @ BALL STATE by searching our journals and databases for a full-text version of your article.

OneSearch is a tool for discovering the resources in the University Libraries collections. The simple search box allows researchers to discover credible and reliable library content in one simple search and see results in a relevancy-ranked list. Researchers can access full-text content when available, locate items in the libraries' collections, or request items through interlibrary loan if necessary.

For more information on this new discovery tool, take a look at the OneSearch subject guide.

As always, though, using only one source for all your information- even a meta-search tool such as this- can leave your knowledge of research topics lacking. Again, there is no quick and easy road to accurate and authoritative research. Real work is involved. Search results will overlap between sources but they will NOT be the same.

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are special strings of numbers and letters that form a persistent link to individual publications. They are issued at the time of publication, much like an ISBN or a serial number. DOIs can be attached to a number of different publications, including journal articles, books and book chapters, conference papers, reports, and so on. The DOI system provides a technical and social infrastructure for the registration and use of persistent interoperable identifiers, called DOIs, for use on digital networks.

You may have already seen a DOI and not realised what it was – all DOIs start with “10.” and are ‘built’ according to the publisher and journal involved – for example, the DOI for the 2004 article “Post-fire survival and reproduction of rehabilitated and unburnt koalas” from the Elsevier-published journal Biological Conservation is 10.1016/j.biocon.2004.03.029.

You can think of DOIs as social security numbers for individual electronic files (ie journal articles or images) which means that the article can be tracked and found by this number as though you had typed in the full citation. DOIs act as permanent links to individual papers, documents, articles, abstracts, photographs, models, etc.

Most indexing services (ie databases/aggregators) use the DOI standard now and some citation styles like APA are beginning to require it if available. Some will allow you to search by the DOI (eg Web of Science, SciFinderⁿ) but you can also use OneSearch, dx.doi.org, DataCite, and CrossRef to “resolve” the link (i.e. find/retrieve the object in fulltext or original format).

In the Ball State University Libraries system, you can use Citation Linker to find fulltext articles with nothing more than a DOI: just copy and paste the DOI into the DOI field on the Citation Linker page and click submit. Find It @ BALL STATE will then search our databases for a fulltext version of the article in question or connect you to our Interlibrary Loan service to obtain it from another institution.