Research Guides: Biology 115L: Principles of Biology: Find Primary Sources: Scholarly Journal Articles

First Choice Science Article Databases

Search engines for finding scholarly articles and, in some cases, book chapters, proceedings, reports, and more. Use "Find it @ WVU" button to link to full-text or request through Interlibrary Loan.

Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Search the most important journals in science and see how many times articles have been cited and where they have been cited.
Agricola (Ebscohost) This link opens in a new window
Indexes books and articles in agriculture
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Indexes articles, including historical content, in a wide-range of disciplines and contains the full text.
EbscoHost This link opens in a new window
Indexes general literature as well as scholarly journals in all subject areas
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Link to WVU content at home Settings/Library Links. An easy way to search, but not comprehensive.

Scientific Papers

How to Read a Scientific Paper

Your textbook provides details about how to read a scientific paper. Here is another source, a tutorial from Michael Fosmire of Purdue University Libraries.

Search Tips

Search strategy tips

Use the advanced search whenever available.
To find out more about the article, read the abstract.
Use Find It @ WVU to retrieve the articles not in full text.
Why use more than one article database? Because extent of literature coverage varies.

bioRxiv

bioRxiv.org: The Preprint Server for Biology is a free online archive and distribution service fro unpublished preprints in the life sciences. Authors make their finding immediately available and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before submission to journals.

Additional Article Databases

Not finding what you need? Try these additional article databases.

Agris This link opens in a new window
AGRIS is an international information system for the agricultural sciences and technology. It was created by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 1974, to facilitate information exchange and to bring together world literature dealing with all aspects of agriculture. AGRIS is a cooperative system in which participating countries input references to the literature produced within their boundaries and, in return, draw on the information provided by the other participants. To date, 240 national, international and intergovernmental centers participate from all over the world.Compiles by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Indexes and abstracts international agricultural literature from over 135 nations.
SciFinder-n This link opens in a new window
Mostly for chemistry research, but does contain references to bioscience sources.
GreenFILE (Courtesy of WVInfoDepot) This link opens in a new window
Scholarly, government and general-interest titles covering human impact on the environment, including the environmental effects of individuals, corporations and local/national governments, and what can be done at each level to minimize these effects. Multidisciplinary by nature, GreenFILE draws on the connections between the environment and a variety of disciplines such as agriculture, education, law, health and technology.