Searching the literature

Searching the biological literature

Pubmed

Essentially all biologically relevant literature is indexed by the National Library of Medicine, and linked to the Pubmed database. The entry point of choice for a search is Entrez, which, in addition to searching in Pubmed also searches a wide variety of other databases, including Genbank.

Sophisticated searches are possible in Pubmed, using the advanced search page. See the Pubmed Tutorial.

Some literature is missing from Pubmed, notably agricultural data (See Agricola for this) and literature pre-1960 or so. The coverage varies with the journal indexed, so a given article may not be present. Other indices, such as Web of Science are more useful for very old references.

Web of Science

The Science Citation Index or Web of Science is an extremely useful tool for searching forward in time from a relevant article. The bibliography of a research paper provides excellent links backward in time to relevant prior work; the science citation index provides a similar mechanism forward in time. Each article, when published, is mined for its references. SCI allows users to search for future articles which reference the article in question. Access is limited, as this is a commercial service. MIT users can access SCI from the Vera home page, A Web of Science tutorial is available here.