Subject Guide to Biology

Back to Guides

If you need help, don't hesitate to ask at the reference desk, or contact Reference Librarians Linda Moore or Mark Maier.

Try these encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference guides to get started. Click on the link to see the call number.

Biological Literature Guide:
Using the Biological Literature: A Practical Guide Ref QH 303.6.D38 2002

Encyclopedias:
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and TechnologyRef Q 121 .M3

Dictionaries:
Elsevier's Dictionary of BiologyRef QH 302.5 .E47 1998
Oxford Dictionary of Biology Ref QH 302.5 D5 2000

Nomenclature:
Synopsis and Classification of Living OrganismsRef QH 83 .S89
Latin Names ExplainedRef QL 9.G67 1996.

Biographies:
Dictionary of Scientific BiographyRef Q 141 .D5 and Ref Q 141 .D7
American Men and Women of Science Ref Q 141 .A474 1998-99

Chronology:
Wilson Chronology of Science and TechnologyRef Q 125.O26 1997
Timetables of ScienceRef Q 125 .H557 1988

Moving to the next step: finding books

To find books in the Mossey Library, use the Mossey Library Catalog.

Use MeLCat to request books and audio-visual materials directly from other Michigan libraries over the web. Use OCLC World Cat to search the holdings of over 3000 libraries worldwide in a single search. You will have to use interlibrary loan to obtain copies of these books.

Continuing on: the best places to find articles

Basic level search:
To find basic or general articles on biological topics already in the Mossey Library, use the General Sciences Abstracts. Many of the articles in this index are available online in electronic format. The General Sciences Abstracts indexes about 30 of the basic titles in Chemistry

Intermediate level search:
For more advanced topics, you can search over 12,000 journals in a single search by using Article First, which indexes the table of contents pages of over 300 core titles in Biology.

Extensive search:
For more detailed research, search Agricola, covering 5000 journals from the last 30 years, specializing in agriculture, forestry, and animal science. An additional database that covers agriculture, forestry, biology, and ecology is Biological and Agricultural Index. It begins in 1983 and indexes 335 journals. For the medical aspects of biology, use Medline. It indexes 9500 journals from 1965 to the present. ECO covers all disciplines, indexing over 3000 titles from 1995-. Some full text is available. Also search BioOne, a full-text aggregation of bioscience, environmental science and ecology research journals.

Give JSTOR a try. This database provides full-text coverage of more than 35 major journals in botany and ecology. The journals have been digitized from their first volume. Each year another volume of recent issues is added to the collection.
Also try searching GoogleScholar for scholarly literature across many disciplines and identify resources available from Mossey Library.

Another resource to use for in-depth research is Science.gov, a tool to search authoratative scientific information from 30 federal scientific databases and more than 1,800 science websites.

Also try the comprehensive Web of Knowledge, a fully integrated database that allows citation tracking and in depth research.

Comprehensive search:
For extensive searches of scientific and technical articles in biology, schedule an appointment with Reference Librarian Linda Moore to conduct a search of BIOSIS. BIOSIS provides indexes and abstracts for thousands of journals, dissertations and conference reports.

Link to the Hillsdale College Biology Department