Bio 3191/Bio455: Molecular Mechanisms in Development: Suggestions for Searching

I suggest two databases for identifying articles to read: Medline and Web of Science. You can use one or both. I've also made some suggestions for locating the articles after you identify them.

Let me repeat Professor Miller's suggestion that you are welcome to ask Biology Library staff or the Biology Librarian for assistance in using the library or databases.

PubMed Medline help:

• Connect to PubMed
• Search strategy tips:
  • Use "*" for wildcard/truncation
  • Use boolean AND, OR, NOT (must be upper-case) to combine terms
  • Use parentheses to combine terms
  • Example: (polarit* OR wnt) AND elegans
  • If results are surprising, click on the "Details" box to see what was really searched. Sometimes it interprets your searches differently than you intended.
• When you are looking at an especially relevant citation you might try some of these techniques:
  • choose Medline display option - this will usually display the subject headings, called MH or MeSH, which may give you some new search terms to try.
  • click on "Related Articles" - this will give you many citations which have MeSH terms in common with the especially relevant citation you started with. These will be listed in relevance order, "best" first, so you only need to browse through the first 20-30.
• If you are working (actually or virtually) on the WU campus, watch for Links to the full text journal; the label will be the title of the journal. We do not have subscriptions to all full text journals, but you will be able to read many articles directly from your computer screen by following these links. We also have many other full text journals that do not have links in PubMed.
• After you have limited (by date or some other criteria) to the articles you want to look for, sort by "journal". Then you only need to search each journal title once, to get library or web location.
• PubMed Help [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query/static/help/pmhelp.html]
• For other Medline options see Medline More Info [http://library.wustl.edu/databases/about/medline.html]

Web of Science help:

• Connect to Web of Science [http://isiknowledge.com/wos] - you must be actually on WU campus or consult Information about access from outside WU campus
• Usually choose "Full Search" and then "General Search"
• Search strategy similar to PubMed:

  Use "*" for wildcard/truncation
  Use boolean AND, OR, NOT or phrases
  Use parentheses to group your search terms
  Web of Science is NOT case sensitive; you may use any combination of upper and lower case letters
  Example, either works fine: (polarit* OR wnt) AND elegans
        Example: (polarit* or wnt) and elegans

• When you are looking at an especially relevant citation, you might want to try some of these techniques:
  • "Related Records" button. This will display citations that have some references in their bibliographies in common with the article you started on. They will be listed in "relevance" order, so you only need to review the first 20-30 citations even though there will likely be MANY more. Sometimes this works very well and sometimes not.
  • If the relevant citation is more than 1-2 years old, try "Times Cited" link. This will give you newer articles that have cited this article, so you can move forward in time. Sometimes this works very well and sometimes not.
• Web of Science allows you to SORT up to 300 citations by Source Title. (If you have more than 300, go through and select first and then sort your Selected Records.) This is quite handy for retrieval since journals are shelved alphabetically by title in both the Biology Library and the Becker Medical Library.
• Click on "help" button while you are in the database for extensive documentation on Web of Science.
• Please be sure to click on "logoff", near the top of the screen, when you are finished in Web of Science; number of concurrent users is limited. Thanks.

Locating the articles: Once you have selected the articles you want to read, here are my suggestions for locating them.

• Consider your fulltext options below.
• Walk around the top floor of the Biology Library; you will be able to find most of the journals you need by the alphabetical arrangement up there; check the unbound area for the most recent issues.
• For the ones you don't find in the Biology Library, search in the Library Catalog of the Danforth Campus Libraries and the Becker Medical Catalog.
• If you have time (1-2 weeks minimum), consider Interlibrary Loan options if you still want to read the article and it is not available here.
• Fulltext options: Of course, if you can read the article on your computer screen, that is handiest. I suggest 3 strategies for determining if we have access to fulltext citations. Search by the title of the magazine or journal, NOT the author or title of the article in the journal.
  1. Search in the Becker Medical Library Catalog Journal Search or on their list of electronic journals by letter.
  2. Search in Fulltext Electronic Journals or find in Biology Library list of electronic journals
  3. Search in the Library Catalog of Danforth Campus Libraries
  4. There are a few other options also, so it never hurts to ask!