When you have a source with a bibliography, you can see if a particular article from the bibliography is available by looking the journal's name up at the link below. Then you can use the volume and date information to navigate to the article. If we don't have access to that journal, we usually can get it from another library.
When searching PubMed, you can narrow the results to "free full text."
For a single source of open access journal articles in the life sciences, this collection from the National Library of Medicine is hard to beat.
Often you will hear the phrase "primary articles" when starting biology research, meaning articles written by scientists reporting new research. These typically introduce the research with a review of previous research in the introduction, methodology, results, and discussion and/or conclusion. Journals in biology also publish "review articles" that provide a roundup of recent research on a topic in biology. If you are looking for primary articles or review articles in biology and biomedical topics, these databases will be especially useful.
Covers research in all areas of biological science, including animal behavior, biomedicine, zoology, ecology, and others. Coverage is from 1982 to the present. Includes abstracts and citations, as well as access to thousands of full text titles.
A good place to start research on most any subject. This multi-disciplinary database indexes nearly 8,050 publications and provides full text for nearly 4,600, including more than 3,900 peer-reviewed journals. Access is provided by eLibraryMN (ELM).
JSTOR is a digital library of journals, academic eBooks, images, and primary sources. JSTOR provides book and journal content from the date of initial publication up to a "moving wall" of 3 to 5 years before the present year.
Multidisciplinary index covering the journal literature of the arts and humanities. Fully covers over 2,300 arts and humanities journals, and also includes some individually selected, relevant items from major science and social science journals. Some of the disciplines covered include archaeology, linguistics, art, literature, music, philosophy, dance, history, religion and theater.
This search engine points toward scholarly research rather than all Web-based sources. It is stronger in the sciences than in the humanities, with social sciences somewhere in between. One interesting feature of Google Scholar is that in includes a link to sources that cite a particular item. Not all of the articles in Google Scholar are free; the library can obtain many of them for you through Interlibrary loan.
If there isn't a PDF available, look for a "find it" link. That will check to see if it's available through another of our databases. If no full text is available, it will give you an opportunity to request the article from another library. You will have to log in using your Gustavus username and password. It usually takes a day or two. Look for an email that will explain how to download the PDF.
If you're using Google Scholar, look for either a "find it @ Gustavus" link to the right or a "more" link under the reference you're interested in.
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