Listed below are seven of the most frequently used databases for finding biological literature. Which is the best database for finding journal articles in biology? The quick answer is that it depends on your specific topic. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
JoVE publishes a collection of video methods journals in biology, chemistry, engineering, medicine, neuroscience and behavior. Articles consist of high-quality video demonstrations and detailed text protocols that facilitate scientific reproducibility and productivity. The scope includes novel techniques, innovative applications of existing techniques, and gold standard protocols.
One challenge that researchers face is where to look for information. Google Scholar is popular but doesn’t include the wide array of resources licensed by the Stanford Libraries. Google Scholar (GS) search results are also limited by the last time GS crawled a website. Current students, faculty, and staff at Stanford are able to use three customized collections of databases to find needed information. Developed by the Stanford Libraries and Deep Web Technologies, these databases are grouped by subject categories and multiple subject categories can be searched at one time. Up to 100 citations are available from each database and the information is retrieved in real-time.
arXiv.org is a great resource for pre-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, and Economics. While the PDF format of the pre-prints hosted there is great for offline reading or printing, it's not the best choice for online viewing, and now there is a great alternative in arXiv Vanity (https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/).
Stanford University is a member organization of The Carpentries, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching foundational skills for research computing skills. This partnership is managed by Dr. Amy Hodge of the Stanford University Libraries, and is open to the entire campus community. Over the past few quarters the Stanford University Libraries have offered the popular two-day Software Carpentry workshops as an open enrollment to anyone on campus. Other campus organizations have also run and will continue to run similar versions of these workshops.
It's likely not news to you that Stanford researchers are undertaking all manner of cutting-edge and groundbreaking work. Applied Physics graduate student Aaron Sharpe is one such researcher who has become intrigued by a single-atom-thick layer of carbon called graphene that he says has, "continuously shaken up the field of condensed matter physics." Graphene sheets, as well as stacks of these sheets, show "unique and tunable electronic properties." We see why Aaron couldn't resist! We talked to Aaron about the research he and his colleagues have been undertaking with graphene and that has recently been published in Science.
Outreach by Stanford science librarians led Aaron to the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR), which he used to make the data and code for this publication publicly-available. "We chose the SDR because it was an easy process to make our data publicly available and permanent and to obtain a digital object identifier (DOI) to reference it in our publication." We completely agree with Aaron's comment that "with any publication, it is important that the data be publicly available."
The National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC) held its first in-person meeting of the year on June 11-12, 2019 in Washington, DC. The full report of the meeting is available on the NGAC website. The NGAC is a Federal Advisory Committee that reports to the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC). Our role is to provide advice and recommendations related to the national geospatial program and the development of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).
