Library Guides: Biology: Home

Subject Resources

If you're just starting out as a biology student and need to get some background/fundamentals, the following can help:

To search all of Schewe's databases, use the following:

To search databases with considerable amounts of biology content, consider the following:

BioOne Complete
This biology database provides full-text coverage of over 180 scholarly journals relating to biology, ecology and environmental science. Specializes in not-for-profit scientific journals.
BioMed Central
This biology and medical database provides full-text coverage of over 200 scholarly journals relating to biology and medicine. You can either browse by journal or use the search box in the top right of the screen to search with keywords.
National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
This database provides access to a massive repository of biomedical and genomic information. The coverage overlaps at times with PubMed and PubMed Central, but also contains other, often freely accessible, articles and resources.
Science (Gale in Context)
This general science database provides a variety of reference, overview, and experimental content related to all the major sciences. Though this database is great for foundational science topics, it does not contain many peer-reviewed articles.
Agricola
This agriculture database includes over 5.7 million citations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agriculture Library. This is the most widely-used database in the agriculture and agribusiness fields.
Gardening & Horticulture (Gale OneFile)
This horticultural database provides access to over 3,000,000 articles sourced from over 100 scholarly and professional journals. The database also includes a variety of reference books, chiefly relating to flowers and foliage.

Here are some searches that will get you a variety of biology books:

Here are some classics in the field that biology majors should be familiar with:

You can find reliable and high-quality videos on a variety of topics below:

You can find reliable and high-quality biology videos on the following topics:

Here are some websites which might be helpful for a biology student:

The New York Times - Biology
A selection of biology articles from The New York Times.
Encyclopedia of LIfe
Data, descriptions, and summaries of many/most biological lifeforms on Earth.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (ICUN) Red List
"The world’s most comprehensive information source on the global extinction risk status of animal, fungus and plant species."
Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio)
Data and images for millions of biological specimens are available in electronic format.
Tree of Life Project
"The project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history."
Biodiversity Heritage Library
"The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives."
bioRxiv
"bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences."

For help citing materials, click below:

For help citing in the APA format, which is often used in biology, consider using Schewe Library's APA citation guide:

You are welcome to contact us individually at:

Jaeda Calaway - Information Literacy Instructor and Student Research Support Specialist
217.245.3207

McKenna Jacquemet - Research Services and Information Literacy Librarian

217.245.3117

Bree Kirsch - Director of the Library

217.245.3573