BSCI 398H - Biology Department Honors Seminar - Biology / Life Sciences Resources (BIOL, CBMG, ENTM) - Research Guides at University of Maryland Libraries

Search Tips

Expanding your search: Truncation

Truncation uses symbols (wildcards) to add letters to the end of a word. You can use these symbols to increase the number of your results.

– To find all information about catalysts…

catalyst* Good, this will get your catalyst and catalysts, but you are missing information about catalysis.
catal* OK, but now you’ve gotten information about catalogs and catalase
cataly* Best choice: includes catalyst, catalysis, catalyzed, catalytic...

– Useful for alternate spellings as well...

theater and theatre: theat*
aluminum vs. aluminium: alumin*
sulfur vs. sulphur: sul* gives sulfate, sulphide, sulfuric... So in this case, you need to do an OR search: (sulfur OR sulphur)

Getting what you want: Phrases/Quotes

Can often use quotation marks to indicate a phrase: methyl ethyl ketone vs. “methyl ethyl ketone”

Also useful when using numbers/symbols: Fe(acac)3 vs. “Fe(acac)3”

Reload Button

To make sure you have access to all of the resources the Libraries subscribes to, be sure to use the Reload Button when you are off-campus.

Search Strategies

	Keyword	Subject Heading	Citation Searching	By Document	Structure	Numerical
Description	Type what you are interested in	Find a controlled term within the database that relates to your topic	Emphasis on number of times publications have been cited	Limit to Review Articles that will focus on background or summarizing existing research	Search by chemical structure, nucleic acid or protein sequence	Search data by numbers, such as chemical and physical properties
Approach	Type keywords and browse results	Start with keyword(s) and look at results for appropriate subject headings OR browse a thesaurus/index within the database.	Start with keyword(s) and sort results by times cited OR start with a specific publication and look to see who has cited it.	Start with any search results list using previous search strategies, then limit by Document Type – Review.	Use drawing program to enter structure or cut and paste from existing document(s).	Use advanced search pages to search for a range of properties by number.
Databases to try	Any that relate to your topic	PubMed, BIOSIS Citation Index, Zoological Record, ProQuest SciTech Collection	Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, BIOSIS Citation Index	PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, SciFinder, ProQuest SciTech Collection	SciFinder (chemical structures), NCBI databases for sequences	Knovel, SciFinder

Core Biology Databases – Searching for Articles and other Publications

Scopus
Scopus is an abstract and citation database with over 80 million records and 1.8 billion cited references that date back to 1970. Includes over 27 thousand serial titles and 249 thousand monographs in the social, physical, life and health sciences, as well as over 44 million patent records. More information on using Scopus is available at: https://elsevier.libguides.com/Scopus.
BIOSIS Citation Index, 1926-present
Combines the unique BIOSIS content that is critical to life sciences research with powerful citation indexing only the Web of Science platform can provide. Includes comprehensive and relevant life sciences coverage.
PubMed
The National Library of Medicine's Medline database that provides abstracts and indexing for about 4,600 biomedical journals published in the U.S. and 70 foreign countries, and includes additional older citations and out of scope citations from Medline journals. Medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, psychiatry, pre-clinical sciences, medical education, public health, health care planning and administration of services. Also includes additional life science journals. mid-1960s - present
Zoological Record, 1864-present
The world's oldest continuing database of animal biology. It is considered the world's leading taxonomic reference, and with coverage back to 1864, has long acted as the world's unofficial register of animal names.
SciFinder-n
You must first create an account using your @umd.edu email address to use the web version. Unlimited simultaneous users. To use off-campus, sign into the GlobalProtect VPN and change the gateway setting to TunnelAll. SciFinder-n is published by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) and gives you access to current high-quality scientific information in chemistry and related sciences. Content at a Glance: searching MEDLINE and Chemical Abstracts (CAPLUS) individually or at the same time; more than 15 million reactions; more than 1 billion predicted property values; more than 2 million experimental properties; the CAS REGISTRY database is updated daily; patent records from the major patent offices are available online within 2 days of the patents' issuance; sequences combined from CAS and GenBank databases, which are indexed and linked to scientific journal and patent literature.