Life Sciences Graduate Students - Research Tips: Databases & General Tips

Resource

Description

PubMed

• Most popular biomedical literature database.
• Use a combination of MeSH terms and title/abstract terms for thorough, yet targeted, searches.
• Save searches/create alerts in your MyNCBI account.

Web of Science

• Good for topics that cross over into other sciences and technology.
• Good for finding articles that cite an article.

Google Scholar

• Recommended for capturing publications beyond scholarly articles (such as dissertations or reports) that cite an article.

PubMed Central

• Recommended for full-text searches, especially looking for terms (cell lines, instruments, software) in the Methods section.

NIH RePORTER

• Use the “save query” button to track newly-funded NIH grants in your field or publications associated with an NIH grant number.

Altmetric It!

• Bookmarklet you save to your web browser.
• Click on the Altmetric It! Bookmarklet when viewing a PubMed reference or an article on a publisher’s website.
• Request notifications of new mentions in social media, news sources, and policy documents.

Journal Publisher Websites

• Look for an option such as “Alerts and Feeds” to receive the table of contents of each new issue by email or RSS feed.

Read by QxMD

• App for keeping up with articles in your favorite journals.
• Select UW as your institutional affiliation in Settings to link to full text.