Bio 305 

Scientific Publishing Cycle

Refereed or Peer Reviewed Journals

How to Read a Scientific Article

Dictionary of Biology (Oxford Reference Online)

Biology-Online Dictionary (Wiki format)

FIND ARTICLE ON A TOPIC FROM JOURNAL CONTENTS

STEP 1

Select an article of interest from Development journal

STEP 2

Read one or two review articles listed in the introduction

• If there is no link to full text, search Journals to determine if the library provides an online or print version
  
• Not owned by the library? Click ILLiad (interlibrary loan) to request an article

OTHER STRATEGIES TO LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR TOPIC

STEP 1

Find articles that cited your original article.

• Consulting a review article or a reference from the author's bibliography takes you back in time to previously published articles. A citation search takes you forward in time by identifying more recent articles that cite or refer to the original article you found.

• At the end of an article in some journals, like Development, you will find a list of cited articles. If an online article does does not contain this information, search Science Citation Index, Expanded.

STEP 2

Find other articles on your topic by searching these databases:

• BIOSIS Previews
• MEDLINE
• Science Citation Index, Expanded
• Google Scholar
  

BIOSIS PREVIEWS - THOMSON ISI (1990+)

An international index of nearly 5,500 life sciences journals and 1,500 items from international meetings and books. Covers traditional biological information such as botany, microbiology, and zoology to related fields such as agriculture, biophysics, ecology, bioengineering, and experimental clinical medicine. A first source for locating relevant articles on a variety of biology topics.

MEDLINE (1950+)

Created by the National Library of Medicine. Covers over 4,800 biomedical periodicals in all languages. Provides excellent coverage of biomedicine and fields such as genetics, neurobiology etc.

SCIENCE CITATION INDEX, EXPANDED (2000+)

Indexes more than 6,400 of the world's leading scholarly science and technical journals covering more than 150 science disciplines, The unique citation search feature lets you search by cited author to discover who may have cited your original article. Noie: USM's version goes back to 2000. Seach Biosis for earlier articles.

GOOGLE SCHOLAR

Google Scholar searches open access materials such as articles, websites, and individual papers, with links to some of the journals to which the USM Libraries subscribe. Whenever a Resources @ USM or Full Text @ USM link appears with a journal record, click it to connect to an electronic version of the article. To enable this feature from off-campus, go to Scholar Preferences and use the Library Links search field to add University of Southern Maine.

When searching GS keep these limitations in mind:

• Searches only a portion of the published scholarly literature.

• Its search engine is still in beta.

• Results are sometimes unreliable when searching articles based on publication dates.

• Does not provide information on how frequently the contents are updated or what scientific journals are scanned, so it is not feasible to know how current or comprehensive your searches are.

• List of citations accompanying articles may be incomplete.

Use boolean operators to connect concepts and perform an effective search.

Use Article Linker to find needed articles

• Click adjacent to database search results to locate an electronic or print article
•  If article not available online or in print, click Submit an Interlibrary Loan to request a copy.  If you are not a registered user, click First Time User and complete the form.You will receive a link to the article by e-mail in 3-5 working days.
• Please do not use interlibrary loan to request articles from print journals that the library already owns, unless they are located at another USM campus from the one where you are based.
• For detailed instructions, review the Linker Tutorial