Using Articles for Research
- Academic journal articles are often authored by scholars and/or professionals active in a particular field
- Academic journal articles can be primary or secondary sources, depending on their purpose
- Scholarly articles provide a close look at a very specific topic, using data to support research findings
- Journal articles can lead you to other relevant sources through their bibliographies
Primary Articles vs. Review Articles
- How can you tell if a scientific article is primary literature?What is a primary scientific literature article? What is the difference between a primary literature article and a review article? How can you tell if an article you’ve found on the Internet is primary literature or not?! Find answers to these questions – and learn how snakes fly! – in this video.
Best Bets for Biology Research at Salve Regina University
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowA large multidisciplinary database providing articles from scholarly journals and magazines.
- General Science Full Text This link opens in a new windowIncludes full-text and abstracting/indexing of scientific publications. 1984 to the present.
- PubMed Central This link opens in a new windowA digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal articles. It is a subset of PubMed which is limited to those articles where the full-text is directly available via PubMed.
- ScienceDirect This link opens in a new windowProvides full-text scholarly journals in science, nursing, and medicine. 1995-present.
- Nature.com This link opens in a new windowAn interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, publishing research in all fields of science and technology.
- SciFinder This link opens in a new windowReturning Users: Login using your username & password.
First Time Users: To register for an account, you need to be on campus. Register here to create user name and password.
Provides access to research from many scientific disciplines including chemistry and the life sciences including: biochemistry, biology, pharmacology, medicine, and related disciplines, as well as organic and inorganic substance information. This database allows a maximum of 3 simultaneous users.
- See all databases for the SciencesThis link will take you to the full list of specialized databases that McKillop Library subscribes to for research in Biology.
Use Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a free web-based search engine that locates scholarly materials such as books, articles, conference proceedings, patents, theses, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports. Google Scholar generally excludes non-academic websites, and its coverage tends to be stronger in the sciences, and weaker in the humanities. Use Google Scholar as an alternative starting point for your research, however, please note that many of the items listed in a set of results will not provide full-text access. Be sure to configure your computer to map results from Google Scholar to available items from subscription databases at McKillop Library! You also want to search McKillop Library's databases directly to ensure comprehensive coverage of your topic.
Does Google Scholar index all of McKillop Library's subscription research databases and provide the full-text of articles from all of these databases?
No. While Google Scholar will allow you to find articles from some of McKillop Library's subscription article databases, it does not index all of our databases. For access to all of the library's databases, see the Databases A-Z list or the Databases by Subject list. For a list of our available journals, see the Journals A-Z list.