The Basics of Searching for Journal Articles

The best way to search for journal articles is with the databases Basic BIOSIS (click here and select Basic BIOSIS) or Web of Science, both of which are available through the NCAT library website. These databases can be accessed from anywhere on campus, or can be accessed from off campus if you set your computer up to access the library’s “Proxy Server”. You can find out how to do this at: http://www.library.ncat.edu/eresources/proxy.htm.

· With Basic BIOSIS, the first screen that comes up will allow you to enter keywords.

· With Web of Science, you will first have to click on ISI Web of SCIENCE, and then click the Full Search button. Click to deselect ‘Social Sciences Citation Index’ and ‘Arts and Humanities Citation Index,’ leaving you with only ‘Science Citation Index Expanded,’ and then click the General Search button. Now you’ll be at a screen where you can enter keywords (under Topic).

Tips for searching:

· Be specific. You can combine words using the words and, or, not (e.g., selection and drift, adaptation or adaptive, selection not sexual).

· Often, your first search will be too broad and will turn up hundreds or thousands of articles!! Repeat the search making it more specific or combining terms (see above). In Web of Science, you can also search by author or journal title. To do this in Basic BIOSIS, click on Advanced (under Searching in the left panel). In Basic BIOSIS, advanced searching will also let you include several keywords or combinations of keywords and author, organism, journal.

· When you’ve found a reasonable number of articles (<100), scroll through and find titles that sound interesting or appropriate. To see an abstract of the article, click the title.

· If you don’t find any articles that you like, try another search with different keywords.

Once you have decided what articles you want to look up, you can look them up at the library or online:

· To find out if the library has the journal, enter the journal name here. If the journal is available, you will see information about where it is kept. Sometimes there will be a link for online access to the journal.

· To find out if the library has online access to the journal, enter the name of the journal here or, in the right panel of the screen, select the letter that the journal name begins with and scroll through the list to find the journal. If you find the journal, there will often be a link to a database where you will probably have to enter the title of the article and the name of the journal.

The above information, plus how to find these electronic resources from the library home page, is included in this handout.