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Biology and General Life Sciences Resources at Yale: Journals and Databases

This guide identifies information resources useful to general biology including databases, news, and other reference sources. Helpful links for determining journal abbreviations are also provided.

Locating Journals

Yale Library's catalog has a filter for Journals & Newspapers, which will limit your results to search only for serial publications. You will have your best results if you change the search drop-down menu to the right of the search box from "All Fields" to "Journal Title."

This screenshot shows visually what was described in the paragraph above about looking for journal titles.

Here is a blank search with the filters pre-applied for you. This will show you both print and online journals. Keep in mind that journals that are out-of-print or from smaller societies may only have their back files in print. You can use Scan and Deliver (available on the item page) for the articles you need.

In addition to the library catalog, we list all available online versions on the Online Journal Page. Pay attention to the date ranges for each available listing — sometimes, we do not have access to all of the back file or (rarely) the most recent 12 months.

The best way to look up any journal in the catalog is to visit https://search.library.yale.edu/catalog.

If you are searching for the best journals to publish in, the Journal Citation Reports can help you find options for your article. 

Databases

Our subscription databases ingest information about articles published in scientific journals, and they analyze that information to create value-added tools like abstract databases (no full text, but you can look up both online and print-only articles) and full-text databases. Some of our databases even enhance the metadata on specific topics to make them especially attractive for researchers looking to take their searches to the next level.

Databases also, generally speaking, provide transparency in their selection criteria and title lists. Some, such as BIOSIS or the Web of Science, have a reputation among journals as being a great achievement to be indexed in — it means that one's journal has "made it." While you can use literature search AI tools as part of your research process, they do not offer you insights into what was ingested, how, and why; using these databases remains an important part of the research process.

Scientific Literature

Data