Library Guides: Biology, Ecology, and Life Sciences: Scholarly Articles and Books

Article Databases

These resources will help you find scholarly (peer-reviewed) articles, the most important information source for STEM fields. Many databases link to works cited by their scholarly resources, plus link to works citing those scholarly resources. Some databases contain additional information about books and other authoritative resources, like patents.

PubMed This link opens in a new window
Includes FindText access to ND's electronic journals if you use the LibGuide's link. Searches MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine's database of citations/abstracts in the fields of medicine, plus additional selected life sciences journals not in MEDLINE. Make sure to take advantage of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings), the NLM controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles for PubMed, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary database of bibliographic information gathered from thousands of scholarly journals and other resources. Because the information stored about each article includes the article's cited reference list (its bibliography), users can also search for resources that cite a known author or work.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
A freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Users can also search for resources that cite a known author or work.
Google This link opens in a new window
A web search engine that links to the world's information, including webpages, images, videos and more. Especially useful for non-traditional but authoritative scholarly resources like governmental reports, patents, and works from professional societies and organizations.

Books

These resources will help you find print and electronic books held by the Hesburgh Libraries, at other local libraries, or at other libraries around the world.

Hesburgh Libraries Online Catalog (ND Catalog)
A catalog of the holdings of the Hesburgh Libraries, Kresge Law Library, and Holy Cross' McKenna Library. Also includes content from the University Archives. For the best results, search the ND Catalog, rather than OneSearch.

WorldCat This link opens in a new window
A worldwide catalog with millions of records about a wide variety of information resources. Created and maintained collectively by more than 9,000 OCLC member libraries and archives, it is the largest and most comprehensive database of its kind.
HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new window
A repository for the nation's research libraries bringing together the immense collections of digital and digitized scholarly resources held by its partner institutions.

Theses and Dissertations

These resources will help you find published theses and dissertations, which present an author's research and findings as part of their degree candidacy or professional qualification.

ProQuest Digital Dissertations This link opens in a new window
A database of doctoral dissertations and master's theses, with subject, title, and author access to almost all American dissertations accepted at an accredited institution since 1861. Offers full text for most dissertations (Notre Dame and other) added since 1997.

Notre Dame's Electronic Theses & Dissertations
A collection providing electronic access to ND theses and dissertations since 2003 via the University's institutional repository CurateND.