LibGuides: BIOL 10, Poffenroth: Finding Articles

Library Databases

In most of your research, you will be looking for information on a topic rather than for an article from a specific periodical. In this case, start your search by going directly to a library periodical database. A database is simply an organized collection of information, like your contacts list in your smart phone. The library has several databases for finding different types of information. For example, you may have used Credo Reference to find background information on your topic and the library catalog to find books. The library also has several databases that provide access to full-text articles from a huge selection of magazines, journals, and/or newspapers.

Start your search for articles with a general database such as Academic Search Complete, which provides articles from popular magazines and scholarly journals on many subject areas. Then, find articles from specialized subject article databases. You can use the A-Z Database List to sort databases by subject. If you are off campus, you will see a login page prompting you to enter your student ID and password.

Most of the databases provide many of the same features including:

searching by keyword
advanced searching by subject, periodical title, author, date, etc.
PDF copies of the scanned full-text
printing, emailing, and saving articles
embedded citation tools

Peer Reviewed Articles

When you're searching in one of our online databases, it's easy to limit your search to peer-reviewed journals. For example, in Academic Search Complete, there's an option on the main search page under "Limit your results" to limit the search to scholarly (peer reviewed) journals:

You can also limit your results after you've done a search by clicking the Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals box in the left margin next to the results:

Keep in mind that not everything appearing in a peer-reviewed journal is a peer-reviewed article; there are also book reviews, editorials, etc.

Health & Medicine Databases

Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition This link opens in a new window
Nearly 550 scholarly full-text journals focusing on many medical disciplines, with especially strong coverage of nursing and allied health. Features abstracts and indexing for an additional 850 journals.
PubMed Central This link opens in a new window
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection. Launched in February 2000, PMC was developed and is managed by NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
ScienceDirect College Edition This link opens in a new window
A leading full-text scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters from nearly 2,500 journals and 26,000 books. View the tutorial below for a demonstration on how to find peer-review articles.

Science Journal This link opens in a new window
Founded in 1880 on $10,000 of seed money from the American inventor Thomas Edison, Science has grown to become the world's leading outlet for scientific news, commentary, and cutting-edge research, with the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general-science journal. Through its print and online incarnations, Science reaches an estimated worldwide readership of more than one million. In content, too, the journal is truly international in scope; some 35 to 40 percent of the corresponding authors on its papers are based outside the United States. Its articles consistently rank among world's most cited research.

Multi-Disciplinary Databases, including Medicine

Academic OneFile This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary coverage of topics in the social sciences, the humanities, education, general science and medicine. Combines indexing, abstracts, full text and images from 3,800 journals, magazines, and news publications. Includes the full-text of the journal Nature from 2000 - 1 year ago.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary coverage of topics in business, the social sciences, the humanities, education and general science. Provides full text for nearly 4,500 journals, including full text for more than 3,600 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 titles.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
With Foothill's subscription to JSTOR, full-text journal issues are typically added 3 to 5 years after publication - a moving embargo wall.

Find a Specific Journal

If you want to find a specific journal, or have a citation already and want to find out if the article is available at Foothill, use the Find Journals in OneSearch to search by journal title or ISSN (International Standard Serial Number). This will show you whether we have the journal available either in the library or electronically. You can also Browse Journals by Category.