Guides and References

Biology Resources on the Web

Starting Points: Comprehensive Guides, Gateways and Portals

• Biology & Biological Sciences Gateway (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
• NBII: National Biological Information Infrastructure
• 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 on the Net (from about.com)
• Current Biology Issues (from the National Biological Information Infrstructure)
• 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]
• Biological & Agricultural Index: (index to periodicals in biology, agriculture and related fields, from 1983 to date. Full text of some articles available) [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]
• BioVisa.net (links to free online journals)
• 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)
• Infotrac-Expanded Acad. Index: (general academic index to articles on a variety of subjects. Full text of many articles available) [MSU Only]
• 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.")
• 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 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]
• US Geological Service National Biological Information Infrastructure

 

Reference Tools: Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, etc.

• BioABACUS (abbreviations and acronyms in biotechnology)
• Biology Dictionaries (Washington University Libraries)
• 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: Feb. 12, 2004

Contact Steven Shapiro for suggestions, corrections, etc.