Biological Sciences 145-04

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. 

You may also want to browse in the library for books on your topic.  Here are some places to try:

QH - natural history, general biology, ecology
QK - plants
S - general agriculture
SB - plant culture

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

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

Journal Articles, AKA Primary Sources

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 confusing 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!)

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!

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.  It covers many more biology journals than Web of Science or JSTOR do, but right now we have bought the rights to search results going back to 1983, so for older papers, you should still try JSTOR and Web of Science as well.   Again, look for MH Links buttons to tell you whether we own an electronic copy or a print copy.      

Academic Search Premier - This index covers major science magazines like Discover, New Scientist, Science News and Scientific American, as well as many science journals, so it's a great place to start.

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 Sciences, and she can make individual appointments with students who need additional help.   You can find additional resources on the library's Biology Research Guide page too.