Top Databases to find Scientific Articles in Biological Sciences
For more databases, see the Biology Subject Guide.
Article databases collect articles of journals in certain disciplines so that you can search through thousands of journals at once.
Some databases, like Academic Search Complete, are called aggregators in that they cover a huge spectrum of subjects in journals, magazines and newspapers.
Some databases like Web of Science and Scopus, are multidisciplinary, in that they cover academic journals in a wide variety of sciences and even social sciences.
Other databases are subject-based, like Biological Abstracts, which covers biological sciences.
Still, some databases are very niche, like Fish and Wildlife Abstracts, that cover just a certain topic or a portion of a discipline.
Some words that mean the same or similar meanings academia are:
scientific articles = academic articles = peer reviewed articles = scholarly articles = refereed articles = scientific literature = scientific articles
A few words may be new to you: peer reviewed and refereed
Both of these indicate that a journal article have gone through a quality control process in which experts in a particular field have reviewed and approved of an article before it is published.
Watch a quick video about the differences between scholarly articles and popular publications.
This is a side-by-side follow along tutorial that takes you through all the steps of searching Web of Science.
Video on how to search Web of Science (start at 21:20)