Biology Resources

Starting Points: Comprehensive Guides, Gateways and Portals

• Biology Links and General Resources (from Academic Info)
• Biology Links (Harvard Dept. of Molecular and Cellular Biology)
• The Bio-Web: Resources for Molecular and Cell Biologists
• Martindale’s Bioscience & Biotechnology Center
• The Virtual Library: Bio Sciences

Biology Issues and News

• ActionBioscience.org (site designed to promote bioscience literacy; from the American Institute of Biological Sciences)
• Biology News Net
• Biology News on the Net (from about.com)
• Ongoing Biology (from the Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum)
• SciCentral: Biology News

Guides to finding articles and more… [Some links are for MSU patrons only]

• Agricola: (index to books and articles on all aspects of agriculture and allied disciplines)
• Annual Reviews: (index to review articles in a number of areas of science and some social sciences. Full text available from some Annual Review titles) [MSU Only]
• BioMed Central ("an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research")
• BioOne: (full text database of articles from a variety of journals in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences) [MSU Only]
• EBSCO Academic: (index to articles of general academic interest. Full text of many articles available) [MSU Only]
• Highwire Press: (index to journals in the sciences and other fields published by Stanford University Press. Many articles are available for free)
• Ingenta: (formerly Uncover; index and table-of-contents of over 20,000 journals on a wide variety of subjects. Full text of some articles available. Other articles are available in full-text for a fee)
• JSTOR: (archive of full-text journal articles. Contains core journals in ecology, from the first issue of the first volume to a three to five year moving wall to the last published issue)
• Ornithological Worldwide Literature (OWL) ("citations and abstracts from the worldwide scientific literature that pertain to the science of ornithology. A major attraction is its coverage of the 'grey' literature, which are not abstracted by commercial databases such as Zoological Record or the Science Citation Index.")
• Proquest Biology (database of full-text journals in the life sciences from 1998 to the present) [MSU Only]
• PubMed (MedLine): (comprehensive index to biomedical journals)
• The Quantitative Biology Archives: (preprints in biological physics, computational biology, neural science, systems biology, bioinformatics, mathematical biology, and theoretical biology)
• Science Citation Index Expanded (citation index which provides access to current and retrospective information from over 6,650 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals across 150 disciplines) [MSU Only]
• Science Direct: (database of more than 1,200 scientific journals published by Elsevier. Recent years of about half of the journals are available in full text) [MSU Only]
• SpringerLink (strong journal coverage in the biomedical and life sciences, business and economics, chemistry and materials science, computer science, earth and environmental studies, law, mathematics, medicine, and physics and astronomy)

Reference Tools: Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, etc.

• Biology Dictionaries (Washington University Libraries)
• Biomedical Sciences Acronyms and Abbreviations (Chang Bioscience)
• BioTech’s Life Science Dictionary
• Glossary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
• Kimball's Biology Pages (an online biology textbook that relies on hyperlinking)
• KEGG: Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes
• Online Biology Dictionary
• Talking Glossary of Genetic Terms (from the Nat’l Human Genome Research Inst.)

Biological Databases

• Biological Databases (from Academic Info)
• World Biodiversity Database (a "taxonomic database"…that aims at documenting all presently known species)

Atlases and Images

• BBID-Biological Biochemical Image Database ("images of putative biological pathways, macromolecular structures, gene families, and cellular relationships" from the National Institute on Aging)
• Biological Sciences Image Galleries (from Academic Info)
• Cartographic Links for Botanists
• LTSN Bioscience ImageBank
• OBIS: Ocean Biogeographic Information System ("global digital atlas to biological information about the ocean")

Teaching and Learning Resources

• BioDiTRL ("an online database with digital media that can be used to assist in teaching biology")
• Biology Education Resources (from Academic Info)
• Biology Online Tutorials
• The Biology Project (from the University of Arizona)
• Biology Resources for Active Learning (from Idaho State University)
• General Biology Lesson Plans (U. of Arizona Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics)
• MBN Online Courses (links to the Molecular Biology Notebooks Online and to other biology courses on the Web)
• ResearchLink 2000 ("research-based experimental systems to the undergraduate biology curriculum" from the Council on Undergraduate Research)
• The Virtual Biology Labs (from Rutgers University)

Information Literacy in Biology

• Academic Writing: Reviews of the Literature (from the Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison)
• How to Write a Literature Review (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz)
• The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It (from the Univ. of Toronto)
• The Research Publication Process (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana)
• Research Publication Process (Univ. of Washington at Tacoma)

Biology Faculty Recommended Sites

• National Center for Biotechnology Information

Last Updated: Jan. 26, 2010

Contact Steven Shapiro for suggestions, corrections, etc.