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Journal Databases
You can find articles on your biology topic by searching in journal databases. The sections below will introduce you to recommended biology databases and answer questions about journal databases:
Recommended journal databases for biology research
How do I find articles on my topic in a journal database?
Tutorial: How to Find Journal Articles
What is a peer-reviewed journal?
Recommended journal databases for biology research
You must access the databases below through the Libraries' website when you are on-campus or off-campus. When you do, you are recognized as being affiliated to UNT and allowed into the database. You will be asked to enter your EUID and password when you are off-campus.
Note: The links below take you to alphabetical lists of resources. Scroll down the list to find the journal database.
Academic Search Complete - Recommended for freshmen and sophomores
Academic Search Complete is a scholarly collection providing full text journal coverage for nearly all academic areas of study - including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts & literature, life and medical sciences, and ethnic studies. Full text is available for nearly 4,600 scholarly publications, with coverage dating back to 1975.
Agricola - recommended for all audiences
Agricola (AGRICultural OnLine Access) via EbsoHost serves as the catalog and index to the collections of the National Agricultural Library. Journal articles, books, conference proceedings, and technical reports are included in Agricola. The earliest information is from the 15th century. Agricola covers all aspects of agriculture and allied disciplines, such as animal and veterinary sciences, entomology, plant sciences, forestry, aquaculture and fisheries, farming systems, agricultural economics, extension and education, food and human nutrition, and earth and environmental sciences. Full text is not available through Agricola but UNT may have the information. Please check the UNT Library Catalog.
Biosis Previews - recommended for upperclassmen, graduate students and faculty
Biosis Previews is the premier database for Biology and related disciplines, and replaces Biological Abstracts and Biological Abstracts RRM. Coverage is from 1989 and includes journal articles, proceedings, and patents. Limited to 8 simultaneous users.
Environment Complete - recommended for all audiences
Environmental Issues & Policy Index via EBSCOHost offers coverage in applicable areas of agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, natural resources, marine & freshwater science, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, urban planning, and more. It provides indexing and detailed abstracts for over 1,000 international journals. Coverage ranges as far back as 1950.
JSTOR - recommended for all audiences
JSTOR provides access to archived backfiles of journals in Arts & Sciences, Language & Literature, General Science, Ecology & Botany, and Music. The full-text of journals is provided for each title beginning with Volume 1. Recent volumes may or may not be included, depending on the agreement between JSTOR and the publishers.
MedLine via EbscoHost - recommended for upperclassmen, graduate students and faculty
MEDLINE via EBSCOhost provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. Created by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE uses (MeSH) indexing with tree numbers, tree hierarchy and explosion capabilities to search abstracts from over 4,000 current biomedical journals.
ProQuest Online - recommended for freshmen and sophomores
Proquest Online provides searching for ABI/INFORM Global, Research Library, and ProQuest Newpapers. The Research Library is a multidisciplinary database including more than 3,950 titles—over 2,700 in full text—from 1971 forward. It features a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, and newspapers.
Science and Technology Collection - recommended for freshmen and sophomores
Science & Technology Collection by EbscoHost contains over 800 leading full text journals covering scientific and technical information. Subjects covered include astrophysics, biology, chemistry, computer technology, geology, physics, archaeology, and materials science.
SciFinder Scholar - recommended for upperclassmen and sophomores, graduate students and faculty
SciFinder Scholar is the electronic version of Chemical Abstracts. Over 1600 chemistry journals are indexed cover-to-cover and 8,000+ journals are monitored. Records go back to 1907. This resource is limited to 3 simultaneous users.
How do I find articles on my topic in a journal database ?
You find articles about your topic by searching the records (or article entries) in a journal database. Some databases (indexes) have records that contain just the article's citation, and others (abstracts) have records that contain the citation and article summary (abstract). Some databases have article records that contain the full text of the article. All databases will look through the article records for the search terms you enter and pull up only records that include those terms.
Most databases have both a basic search screen and an advanced search screen where you can enter your search terms. I highly recommend using the advanced search because you can use Boolean statements to build a more tailored search that will retrieve more relevant articles. If you've never done Boolean searching, don't worry because it's not difficult. See Search Strategies to Find Journal Articles and Save Time for instructions.
What is a journal database?
A journal database is a collection of information from articles, which is gathered from a group of journals. The database is called an index when the only information collected is the citation of each article. The database is called an abstract when the citation and abstract (or summary) of each article is collected. When the article information is added to the database, it is given subject headings to describe the content of the article. The combined information forms a record for each article.
What is a peer-reviewed journal?
A peer-reviewed journal is one that requires review and approval of submitted articles before they are published. Most scientific journals will have a large group of reviewers, all of whom have a specialty in the journal's field. When an article is received, it is sent out to the reviewers who are most familiar with the subject matter. The reviewers carefully read the article to check whether the experiments were done correctly, the results are valid and the conclusions are logical. If the reviewers approve the article, they usually send suggestions back to the author for further experiments or improvements in the writing. When the revisions are completed and approved, then the article is finally published.
Journal Packages
Contents:
How should journal packages be used in biology research?
Recommended journal packages for biology research
What Are Journal Packages?
Journal packages are electronic collections of journals that are usually produced by one publisher. For example, the publisher Elsevier produces all of the journals in the journal package Science Direct and Wiley Publishing produces all of the journals in Wiley InterScience.
How Should Journal Packages Be Used in Biology Research?
Journal packages should not be used to find articles on a subject. Topic searches should be done in a journal database (abstract and index). Journal packages should only be used to find already identified articles in full-text.
The reasons for the above statements are:
- Journal packages usually contain 100s of journals, while journal databases index and/or abstract 1000s of journals, so you get a more extensive search with a journal database.
- Journal databases have more sophisticated search features, so you can do a more tailored search in them, then in journal packages.
- If a publisher has an agenda, that bias may be reflected in some or all of the titles in a journal package, thus you would only get one perspective on a topic.
Appropriate uses of journal packages are:
- Finding a full-text article that is not available in a journal database. Many times the Find Full Text link in an article record in a journal database will take you directly to a journal package. If it does not, you can search for the journal title in the catalog and then find the link to the correct journal package.
- Setting up a journal alert so that you will get an email every time a new issue of a journal is posted in the journal package. Most journal packages allow you to create a personal account in which you can create journal and other kinds of alerts. For more information, see the Email Alerting Services webpage.
Recommended Journal Packages for Biology Research
American Chemical Society Journals
Full text access from volume 1 of the journals published by the American Chemical Society. Articles can be downloaded or printed in PDF or HTML formats.
The Company of Biologists is a United Kingdom charity that publishes three peer-reviewed journals edited by professional biologists. The journals are Development (1987 to current), the Journal of Cell Science (1966 to current), and the Journal of Experimental Biology (1930 to current).
The Indian Academy of Sciences Journals provides free full-text access to their publications. Disciplines covered include Chemistry, Math, Materials Science, Biology, and Astronomy.
Nature Publishing Group Online Journals
Full-text access is provided to Nature, EMBO Journal, and EMBO Reports from 1997 to current, Nature Biotechnology from May 1998, Nature Cell Biology from May 1999, Nature Materials from September 2002, Nature Medicine from May 1998, Nature Physics from October 2005, and Nature Structural and Molecular Biology from May 1998.
ScienceDirect provides full text access to over 1800 journals from Elsevier and Academic Press, representing all areas of science, medicine, and technology, as well as inter-disciplinary titles. Coverage is from 1995 to current, but some titles in physics, chemistry, and mathematics begin with volume 1, regardless of the year.
Full text access from 1997 to current for over 350 Wiley journals in biology, chemistry, mathematics, behavioral sciences, and computer sciences. Synergy (Blackwell) titles were merged into Wiley Interscience during Summer 2008.
Open Access Journals
What Are Open Access Journals?
Open access journals are electronic journals that are free for the public to use. They are often sponsored by organizations, associations or governments. You can always go to open access journals directly using an Internet browser, but the Libraries provide access points for you in the UNT Library Catalog and Electronic Resources to make you aware of the journals, and as a convenience.
Recommended Open Access Journals
BioMed Central is a publisher of peer-reviewed, mainly open access biomedical journals. Currently, BMC publishes over 100 e-journals on its website. Research articles are published immediately after acceptance to promote rapid progress in science. Please consult the journal title directory to determine whether an individual journal is open access.
Directory of Open Access Journals: DOAJ
The Lund University Libraries in Sweden support this directory of over 2000 open access journals, 260+ of which are searchable at the article level. All subjects are included with large collections in biology, education, health sciences, history, library and information science, mathematics and the social sciences.
University of California eScholarship Repository
Ten University of California campuses submit their scholarly work to the Repository, which is sponsored by the California Digital Initiative. The subject matter is multidisciplinary, with contributions from the humanities, social sciences and sciences. The 14,800 plus papers include journal articles, peer-reviewed series, working papers, discussion papers series, and seminar series.
Proceedings
What Are Proceedings?
Proceedings are the official record of a conference, usually held by an association or organization. The proceedings may include contributed papers, abstracts of papers or presentations, and other types of documents.
Articles or papers from conference proceedings can be more difficult to find than journal articles because they are not indexed in as many resources, and often the official title of the conference is difficult to identify.
Recommended Resources for Finding Articles/Papers
If a conference paper is not full-text in a resource below, please check the UNT Library Catalog to see if it is available in print. An author search for the organization usually works best.
Please contact Ask Us whenever you have difficulty finding a conference proceeding.
AGRICOLA (AGRICultural OnLine Access) via EbsoHost serves as the catalog and index to the collections of the National Agricultural Library, as well as a primary public source for world-wide access to agricultural information. Journal articles, books, conference proceedings, and technical reports are included in Agricola. The earliest information is from the 15th century. Information contained in Agricola covers all aspects of agriculture and allied disciplines.
Biosis Previews is the premier database for Biology and related disciplines, and replaces Biological Abstracts and Biological Abstracts RRM. Coverage is from 1989 and includes journal articles, proceedings, and patents.
Directory of Published Proceedings: DOPP
An open access resource useful for locating and procuring published conference proceedings.
PapersFirst via FirstSearch contains citations of papers presented at worldwide meetings, conferences, expositions, workshops, congresses, and symposia.
ProceedingsFirst via FirstSearch
ProceedingsFirst via FirstSearch cites over 19,000 articles published in printed reports of congresses, conferences, etc. received by the British Library; international in scope.
Web of Science service provides web access to the following citation indexes from 1995 to the present: Science Citation Index; Social Sciences Citation Index; and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. These resources enable the user to identify related writings (periodical articles, reviews, conference proceedings, etc.) by indicating sources in which a known article by a given author has been cited.
