Science and Engineering Library

Database Descriptions

getting started > tutorial >learning about the databases

A database is a a large collection of information that is searchable. General Science Full Text, Web of Science, PubMed and Biological Abstracts (BIOSIS) are four distinct, huge, searchable databases containing information about individual articles issued in thousands of journals devoted to the sciences. A search in this type of database is the best way to identify journal articles on a specific topic. Link to these and all of the databases available through the Science and Engineering Library from the Indexes and Databases section of our web site.

General Science Full Text
Index to articles in close to 200 English language journals and magazines. Coverage begins with 1983 and encompasses all science disciplines. Publications monitored include scholarly journals as well as popular science magazines and even the weekly New York Times Science Section. Includes article abstracts or summaries beginning in 1984, article full text for about 25% of the titles beginning 1995, and links taking you to the BU Library Catalog for titles we own. Good database to use as a starting point for information. The likelihood of finding the journal you need on site is high.

Web of Science
Includes three citation indexes - Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and of particular interest to us, Science Citation Index. The latter indexes articles from 5,000 of the most heavily cited (high impact) research journals in all the science and engineering disciplines. Coverage is from 1978 to the present. Unique to this database is the tracking of citation relationships between articles, enabling users to navigate from an article of interest to related articles that either cite or are cited by it. This feature provides a way to subject search without using keywords. Counts of the number of times articles have been cited over the years are also of interest to faculty members, particularly when documenting their accomplishments for promotion and tenure decisions.

PubMed
Index with abstracts to journal articles related to the broad field of biomedicine, including chemistry, life science and general science. Covers 1966 to present. When available, provides access to full-text articles at journal web sites, and other related web resources. This database includes a digital version of some text books. This is an especially good database to use to access citations from medical literature.

Biological Abstracts (BIOSIS)
Index with abstracts to the worldwide journal literature in the life sciences. Covers 1985 to the present. Includes links to the BU Library Catalog for titles we own. Comprehensive for the life sciences, including agriculture, biochemistry, biotechnology, botany, ecology, the environment, microbiology, neurology, pharmacology, public health and toxicology. This is the database to use for a comprehensive search on a biological topic or to find detailed research-oriented information.

getting started > tutorial >learning about the databases