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BIO-1201 / BIO-1301: Science Research

Article Searches

All library research databases can be found on the A-Z Databases page. Filter by subject (science or health) to get a list of all science-related databases.


What you need to know:

ProQuest Central is a large multidisciplinary aggregator database, containing much science-related content in several subset databases. It includes journals on aerospace; agriculture; biological science; computer science; earth, atmospheric & aquatic science; engineering; environmental science; materials science; health and medicine; and general science & technology.
Includes:         My Account      Save Articles      Search Alerts      Citation Generator




Searching for Research Articles versus Review Articles

  1. In ProQuest Central, go to Advanced Search and enter your search terms, check Peer reviewed checkbox, and click Search.
  2. On your results page, look to the left column and scroll down until you see Document Type. Click the down arrow to expand and then click on ‘More >’
  3. In the pop-up box (as shown below), check the box in the Include column for Articles. Then check the boxes in the Exclude column next to Literature Reviews and Reviews. Click Apply.




What you need to know:

PubMed is a free database developed by the National Library of Medicine, containing over 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering, including biology, environmental science, marine biology, plant and animal science as well as biophysics and chemistry. Increased coverage of life sciences began in 2000.
To find the full text, check the right hand column for Full Text Links. In some cases, that link will go to an open access article, and you will be able to download the full text. In other cases, the link will go a journal publisher site in which the article is not freely provided. In that latter situation, look for the title of the journal and look it up in our Publication Finder to see if we have access.
Includes:         My Account      Save Articles      Search Alerts      Citation Generator

PubMed Help: Quick Start


Searching for Research Articles versus Review Articles

  1. In PubMed, click Advanced Search.
  2. On the Advanced Search Builder screen, enter your search terms and click Add. The term(s) should appear in the Query box.
  3. Back in the upper box, type in review[pt] and click the drop-down arrow on the Add button, and select 'Add with NOT.' This adds this string onto your original search terms.
  4. Click the Search button.
  5. By adding the string, NOT review[pt], we've asked the database to remove articles labeled with the publication type, 'review.' Most of the articles that remain will be a form of original research.



What you need to know:

Cyclone Search is the library's discovery search tool, searching across a large portion of the library's digital subscriptions as well as our physical collection. For science research, it includes Academic Search Complete, the MEDLINE citation index (PubMed), ProQuest Central, and our JSTOR science journals. Academic Search Complete is a large, multidisciplinary database covering peer-reviewed journals as well as magazines and reports. It contains nearly 4,000 active, full text journals that are indexed in one or both of the major scientific citation databases, Web of Science and Scopus. Subjects covered include animal science, biology, chemistry, engineering, general science and technology, geology, pharmaceutical sciences, physics, veterinary science, and zoology.
Includes:         My Account      Save Articles      Search Alerts      Citation Generator




What you need to know:

JSTOR is an interdisciplinary digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources. Nearly all journals in the database are peer-reviewed. Subjects covered include: agriculture, aquatic sciences, biological sciences, botany and plant sciences, engineering, environmental science, general sciences, health sciences, technology, and zoology. JSTOR journals are grouped into collections for libraries to license - Centenary subscribes to several collections, though not all, so there may be content that is not immediately available to you. JSTOR collections are for the most part, archival, meaning that the most current issues are not included.
Includes:         My Account      Save Articles      Search Alerts      Citation Generator

JSTOR Register and Read
How to Use JSTOR (for Students)


What you need to know:

Google Scholar is Google's attempt to index the scholarly literature that can be found on the free web. It links to freely available articles on publisher websites, author websites, institutional repositories, and pre-print servers, as well as reports, online books, and other scholarly material online. In some ways it can be easier to search than subscription databases, in that it is better able to process a natural language search. Because it searches so much, and because there are very few filters included, it can also be more difficult to sort through the results.
Includes:         My Account      Save Articles      Search Alerts      Citation Generator

Library Links
- Connect Google Scholar results to Centenary's digital subscriptions in order to get to full text articles to which the university has access.
Google Scholar Button
- Add this extension to your browser to be able to highlight and look up papers as you browse. This is useful for checking for full text, and for getting an idea of how many times an article has been cited.