BIO198 Labs - Biology 198 Laboratory Courses

Probably the best database to use to get started on your biology research is ScienceDirect.

Before you get started searching for science articles, it's important to make a distinction between reference sources and research sources.

REFERENCE

A reference resource can give you basic, known information about a subject.

Example: Search for 'enzyme' in AccessScience. You'll see there are many results explaining how an enzyme works, the chemical structure, classifications, etc.

RESEARCH

Peer-reviewed research articles offer us some new insight into biology, and often do not contain the basic information you might find in reference resources.

Example: Search in ScienceDirect for 'enzyme'. You'll see that your results list gives you both 'Review' articles and 'Research' articles.

Review articles typically synthesize the information on a topic (sometimes very narrow or specific topics.)

Research articles convey the hypothesis, method, and conclusion from specific experiments.

Each will provide you with a collection of citations. If you see a citation reference you think will be useful in your own work, look it up in Summon (the library's search engine).

if you're unfamiliar with the process of academic research, and how to use the university library, check out the Introduction to Library Research presentation.