Research Guides: Biology: Recommended Databases

Try These Databases First

Annual Reviews This link opens in a new window
To help students, faculty and researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic, access to all Annual Reviews journals is available.
Authoritative and comprehensive review articles in the physical and social sciences. is A good place to start research or read the most current overview of a topic.
Biodiversity Heritage Library
The world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives, includes digitized books and journals created by a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries.
BioRxiv
A preprint server (repository for papers prior to their publication) in the life sciences. Articles are not peer-reviewed, edited, or typeset before being posted online. However, all articles undergo a basic screening process for offensive and/or non-scientific content.
Medline (Ebscohost)
Index to medical literature, created by the National Library of Medicine, with links to journals on the Ebscohost platform.
PubMed
PubMed is the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) searchable database of citations , primarily from the biomedicine and health fields, and related disciplines such as life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering.
ScienceDirect
Full text scholarly journal articles in the physical and biological sciences, business and economics, education, medicine, psychology, and more.

Finding an article from a citation

Do you have an article citation, but not the article?

Find the journal that the article is in using the Worldcat Discovery Journal Search. Then either search within that journal, or drill down to the article using the year, volume, and issue information you have. Be sure to enter the name of the journal, NOT the name of the article.

Selected Journals

The journals listed below are often used in the biology field. If you are not finding the date ranges you would like, be sure to check the library's journals listing for resources with different date ranges.

Cell
Cell publishes findings of unusual significance in any area of experimental biology.
Developmental Biology
PLoS One
An international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication. PLOS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline.
Environmental Health Perspectives
Publishes articles from a wide range of scientific disciplines encompassing basic research; epidemiologic studies; risk assessment; relevant ethical, legal, social, environmental justice, and policy topics; longitudinal human studies; in vitro and in vivo animal research with a clear relationship to human health; and environmental medicine case reports.