Life & Environmental Sciences

1. Search the Library Website for your keywords. The Library Website searches many of the databases the University Library subscribes to and is the best place to start your research. You may well find enough data that you do not need to search any other databases. 

2. If you don't find the results you need from the Library Website you could search the databases individually. This page shows some of the databases likely to be most useful for the School of Computing, but you can find the full list here on the databases page.

3. Do you already know the name of a journal?  Type the title of the journal in Electronic Journals A-Z: it will show you if we have full-text access to the e-journal.

The advanced search gives you more options to combine keywords and conduct a more detailed search

• You can use synonyms/similar terms to broaden your search and link them together using the OR option
  • Cat OR feline (this will find results with EITHER of these terms)
• You can use the AND function to narrow your search
  •  Reptiles AND breeding (this will only find results that contain BOTH these terms)
• Be aware of differences in American and English spelling - many databases use American spelling and terminology 
  • organisation (UK)/organization(US)
  • You can use a ? to search for both variations at once - organi?ation
• Truncation - you can put a * at the end of a word stem to search all forms of a word
  • Biolo* searches for both biology and biological.
• Phrase Searching - use " " around words to search for a phrase rather than individual occurences of each word
  • "genetic variation"

Limiting your results:

• You can reduce the number of results using the limiters on the left-hand side, including date and source type
• Tick the limit to full text box if you only want to search for articles available in full text, rather than as abstracts,
  • Remember to click Update after you have set you limiters

Accessing articles:

• Click on the Find Full Text link and enter your University Email Address and Password when prompted.
• Click on the appropriate PDF, HTML full text, or database link

Browzine allows you to create your own online bookshelf from our collection of journals.

It's available through the 'Find' menu on the Library website - select 'Browse electronic journals' from the drop-down menu and start building your bookshelf.

A good way of keeping up-to-date with current research is to subscribe to alerts from your favourite journals.

JournalTOCs is a free service which allows you to set up alerts.

The University Library subscribes to a selection of database collections - the majority are research databases containing journal articles, but we also have ebook collections, film, tv & newspaper archives, and other specialist information.

Research databases contain:

Abstracts (short descriptions of what an article or paper is about)

Full journal articles (if they are part of the subscription package)

Conference papers on specific subjects

The research databases listed below contain journal articles, abstracts and conference papers that will be useful for Life Sciences.  

Use the search box on the library website to search across a selection of databases or access them individually by clicking on the title links and, if asked, entering your University email address and password.