| Accessing article indexes
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Access article indexes from the research guide or from the Library's home page by click on the Indexes & Databases tab . Some of the indexes that biologists commonly use to search for scholarly scientific literature are BIOSIS Previews, CAB Direct, PubMed, Web of Science, and Zoological Record.
| Some tips for search indexes:
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- Some indexes use controlled vocabulary called Subject Headings. If that's the case, determine what the subject headings are for your topic and use them in your search.
- Remember the Boolean operators?
- OR will expand your search by looking for any of the words to capture synonyms, variant spellings or related terms. e.g. white adipose tissue or fat tissue or white fat
- AND will narrow your search by looking for all of the words and allow you to combine more than one idea. e.g. mitosis and yeast
- You can also use truncation to capture variant endings of a word. e.g. secret* will find secrete, secretes, secreting, secretion.
- Note: the symbol varies between indexes (common ones are * $ ?).
- Indexes allow you to search for specific authors and journals in addition to keywords/subject headings.
- Many indexes permit you to limit your search by date, language, publication type (e.g. review articles).
