Biology Research: How to Find Scholarly Journal Articles and Books
This Library Guide is intended as a convenient starting point for your research. You will undoubtedly have questions that are not answered here; this is normal. Please rely on assistance from the expert researchers, the librarians. We are here to help you succeed! Use our Ask a Librarian service. You also can make Research Appointments with individual librarians. Librarian Bonnie Petry is the Biology liaison. Look for the big blue Ask a Librarian and Research Appointments buttons throughout our website:
You also might find another one of our Library Guides very useful: Doing Your Research From Home.
KEYWORD SEARCH STRATEGIES
TO FIND ARTICLES OR BOOKS IN THE
RECOMMENDED DATABASES
Use quotation marks around multiple word phrases to search those words, in that order, as one unit. NOTE: single keywords do not need quotation marks.
Examples: "jumping spiders" also "scanning electron microscopes".
Use the truncation symbol (*) to search all different endings of a word at once.
Examples: environment* will retrieve environmentally, environments, and environmental.
Use words or phrases that are spelled differently, but mean the same thing.
Examples: bird also fowl.
MORE HELP WITH KEYWORD SEARCH STRATEGIES
- Keyword Search StrategiesHow to use keywords to make your searches more effective.
RECOMMENDED DATABASES FOR ARTICLES
When searching a recommended database for scholarly journal articles, add additional keywords to the strategies above in order to narrow your results.
Examples:
- "jumping spiders" temperature habitat
- melanoma gender survival
- "scanning electron microscopes" tardigrades
- BiologySelected from our more than 150 databases, these are the best ones to try first for finding scholarly journal articles on biology topics.
HELP FOR NARROWING A TOPIC AND FINDING FULL TEXT
- Narrowing a TopicIf your topic is too big for your paper, it makes things more difficult than they need to be. This guide has lots of strategies you can use right away to narrow down a topic.
- Maximize Your Full Text!Having a difficult time finding full text for the articles you want? You need this Library Guide!
THE RECOMMENDED DATABASE FOR BOOKS
OneSearch is the database that finds books at this library, many of which are full text online.
When you begin typing a search into OneSearch, you will see a drop down menu. Click on Books & Media CSUSB NOT on the search button.
Once you get your list of search results, if you only want to see the books that are online, use the left hand toolbar to click in the box next to Full-text online as shown below:
and then click the big green Apply Filters button:
HOW OUR EBOOKS WORK
- Ebooks at Pfau LibraryHow ebooks from Pfau Library work, including download options.
