Biological Science 334

Finding Your Way

Books and Background Info

Journal Articles

Need more help?

Finding your way

Library, Information and Technology Services (LITS) provides library and technology support to the campus. Use our document Getting Around in LITS to tell you where to find people and places in our buildings. Many of the materials you may want to use for your classes are available online, but you will also need printed resources to do your best work. You may also want to Ask a Librarian for assistance. The science librarian is Sarah Oelker, and her office is next to the Reference Room on Level 4 of Williston Library.

The library also has a lot of online tools and tips for helping you with your research:
Writing and Citing Tools - links to lots of online writing and citing information, including how to get started with RefWorks bibliographic management software
RefWorks - the bibliography software purchased by MHC for student use.  You will need to sign up for this system from a computer that is on our campus network, in order to begin putting references in the system.
Inter-Library Loan (ILLiad) - our system for requesting books outside of the five colleges.  If you have not registered for ILL use yet, please click on the "New to ILLiad?  Sign up!" link on the page.  You will need the library barcode on the back of your OneCard in order to sign up, and please don't use the same password for this system as for your MHC email account.   

Books and other Background Information 

You have been asked to find primary resources, accounts of original research, for your assignment, but you will also need secondary resources, which are overviews, summaries of many studies, or other documents that will give you  background information and "the big picture" about the systems you are studying.  There are a few different ways to find information in books for your project.  One of those ways is to search the Library catalog.  Once you are in the catalog, you can choose from the links in the upper right to search Mount Holyoke alone, or All Five Colleges.  Note that you can request books at the Five Colleges libraries using the Request Item link present in the catalog's records for individual titles. 

When searching the catalog, or other book resources, you will find more results about broader topics like pancreas, adrenal system, and renal hormones than about the names of individual hormones like human chorionic gonadotropin or ghrelin. A note about abbreviations:  you've probably noticed that many terms in molecular biology are commonly referred to by their abbreviations, but find out the full name of the hormones you are studying, and make sure you try searching under the full name, not just the abbreviation.     

General works on endocrinology have call numbers that start with QP 187, and you will find books in QP 188 and higher numbers on the workings of individual glands and systems within endocrinology.  Books in QP are about physiology, more broadly, so do find books in the catalog that sound useful, and then look for other helpful books around them in the stacks.  Q books are on Level 6 in the Miles-Smith wing of the building, over the Information Commons. 

There are other places where you can find books or book chapters for background information:

NCBI Bookshelf - a great place to start for resources for your assignments-- it is a free collection of whole books and book chapters, from medical and advanced science textbooks.  It comes to us from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a part of the National Library of Medicine. 

Ebrary - this collection of online books is represented in the library catalog too, but you may want to use the search interface on their website to find books in their collection.

NetLibrary - another collection of online books Mount Holyoke subscribes to, also represented in the catalog.  Again, use this link if you want to just search for materials within this collection.

Encyclopedia of Life Sciences - provides detailed articles on  biological topics, many of them about the hormones and systems you are studying. 

GenomeNet - a set of Japanese genome resources and tools-- look for the KEGG PATHWAY section to look up pathways relevant to your assignment.  Note that major endocrine and immunological pathways you may be working on are in the "Cellular Processes" section. 

Entrez Home - the parent search system of PubMed, below, and NCBI Bookshelf, above.  Go here for lots more choices, like online Medelian Inheritance in Man, online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals, and nucleotide and protein databases.  Beware: this system will overload you with information, but it can be helpful when you want to look up a protein or gene name. 

Journal Articles, AKA Primary Sources

PubMed - This is a massive index of the primary research literature in medicine and the fields that support medicine with basic research.  Use it to look up the compounds, genes and pathways you are working on.  Don't stop at the short descriptions of the papers-- click on a paper title for the abstract and the MH Links button that will help you find out whether Mount Holyoke has a copy for you to use.     

Biological Abstracts - this index to the biological literature looks just like Web of Science, but is a different file attached to the same search interface.  Right now we have bought the rights to search results going back to 1983, so for older papers, try PubMed and Web of Science.   Again, look for MH Links buttons to tell you whether we own an electronic copy or a print copy.      

JSTOR - this system's full name is The Journal Storage Project, a large archive of journal articles in all subject areas.  Note the word "storage"-- there's nothing newer than five years old, in this system.  The other databases on this list may reference material for which the whole articles are stored in here, so you don't have to do searching in JSTOR: Web of Science and PubMed will point you to important papers in it!

Web of Science - ISI Web of Knowledge and Web of Science index the most highly cited journals in many subject areas.  This is also an easy way to see who has cited whom.  This database can be hard to search-- try this Web of Science Guide from librarians at The University of Maine for more help.  Look for the MH Links buttons to tell you which things we own (and help you request the others via inter-library loan!) 

Need more help?

Try our Ask a Librarian page if you would like more assistance from the LITS liaisons-- it's a way to reach the entire Research and Instructional Support team.  You can also visit us at the reference desk in the library's main reading room.  You may want to speak with Sarah Oelker, Liaison to Biological Studies, and she can make individual appointments with students who need additional help.   You can find additional resources on the library's Biology Research Guides page too.