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Welcome!
Welcome to the Biological & Environmental Sciences Guide. This guide will introduce you to resources that may help you with your assignments and projects. If you need assistance, please visit the Help tab.
Find Articles: First Options
- Biological Abstracts This link opens in a new window A complete collection of bibliographic references covering life science and biomedical research literature published from more than 4,000 journals internationally.
- Ebsco eBook Collections This link opens in a new window Access thousands of full-text electronic books across multidisciplinary and subject specific collections.
- Environment Complete This link opens in a new window Contains more than 2.4 million records from more than 2,200 domestic and international titles going back to 1888.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new window Use this link to show PennWest full text in your Google Scholar results.
- JSTOR Collections This link opens in a new window A full-text archive of over 1,700 of the best scholarly journals in social sciences, humanities, and life sciences disciplines. Includes access to ARTStor.
- MEDLINE Complete This link opens in a new window Provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more, dating back to 1857 with full-text back to 1865. MEDLINE Complete is the world's most comprehensive source of full text for medical journals, providing full text for over 1,800 journals.
Useful Websites
- Cell Image Library A free, public repository of reviewed and annotated images, videos, and animations of cells from a variety of organisms, showcasing cell architecture, intracellular functionalities, and both normal and abnormal processes. Sponsored by the American Society for Cell Biology.
- List of Biological Databases This article in Wikipedia lists an extensive array of biological databases. Don't think "journals." These are "stores of biological information" covering: nucleic acid databases, amino acid/protein databases, and other databases created by researchers.
- National Academies Press (E-Books) NAP publishes reports from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. You can download FREE PDFs for thousands of ebooks. Browse the topics from the menu.
- National Center for Biotechnology Information This is a "first stop" site for molecular biology research. NCBI creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information.
- National Science Digital Library NSDL was created by the National Science Foundation to provide educators at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education with innovative teaching resources and tools.
- PDB-101: Educational Portal for Protein Data Bank PDB-101 is for teachers, students, and the general public to promote exploration of proteins and nucleic acids. How does it differ from the Protein Data Bank? PDB is the central storehouse of biomolecular structures--but is designed for experts. PDB-101 builds introductory materials designed to help beginners get started. It's the "101," entry level, course. From RCSB.
- Protein Data Bank The Protein Data Bank (PDB) serves as a repository of information about the 3D structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies. If you find this advanced site difficult to work with, consider using the PDB-101 site. From RCSB.
- Science.gov Provides access to authoritative, selected science information from U.S. Government agencies, including research and development results. (Link goes to the Advanced Search. For the Basic search screen, click on their "Home" link in the menu.)
Visual and Specialized Resources
- Academic Video Online (AVON) This link opens in a new window The database includes scholarly video material of virtually every video type: documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, field recordings, commercials, demonstrations, original and raw footage including tens of thousands of exclusive tiles. There are thousands of award-winning films, along with the most frequently used films for classroom instruction, plus newly released films and previously unavailable archival material.
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new window Access streaming videos in the humanities, sciences, medicine, business, social sciences, and more.
Find Articles: More Resources
- Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window A multi-disciplinary database, Academic Search Ultimate offers students an unprecedented collection of peer-reviewed, full-text journals, including many journals indexed in leading citation indexes.
- Agricola This link opens in a new window Containing bibliographic records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Library, AGRICOLA dates back to 1970 and includes more than 4.8 million citations.
- GreenFILE This link opens in a new window Offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment, and provides indexing and abstracts for more than 1,000,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 15,000 records.
- OneSearch This link opens in a new window OneSearch combines most of the library's resources into a single database. Rather than search databases separately, you can do just "one search." OneSearch includes articles, ebooks and books, and more.
- SciFinder-n (CAS) This link opens in a new windowBEFORE you can use SciFinder-n, you need to REGISTER for an account by creating your own username and password. Once you are registered you can use the SciFinder-n link to access the database.
- U.S. Major Dailies This link opens in a new window Full-text of New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times from the mid 1980's - today. (Proquest)
Understanding Scientific Literature
- 6 Article Types that Journals Publish: A Guide for Early Career Researchers A select list of six common varieties of scientific literature.
- How to (seriously) Read a Scientific Paper Science magazine "asked a dozen scientists at different career stages and in a broad range of fields to tell us how they [read scientific papers]." Provides helpful guidelines. From March 2016.
- How to Read a Scientific Paper (ASPB) This PDF provides an excellent introduction to the practices and conventions of scientific articles. From the American Society of Plant Biologists, 2013. The following sections are very helpful: Scientific Papers are Peer-Reviewed on p.3 Anatomy of a Scientific Paper on p.4
- Phases of Clinical Research Detailed description of the pre-clinical and clinical phases (0-4) of research.
- Types of Scientific Literature "A brief list of some of the various types of written information that scientists may consult during the course of their work." Written by a science librarian at SUNY-Geneseo.
- What Are the Different Types of Clinical Research? Briefly defines types of research, including the four clinical trial phases. From the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.
