LibGuides: LB 133 Spring 2021: Following Science Upstream

Some Clues to Look for in Your Popular Source

Find as many of these clues as you can in your popular source. Then you can enter them into an academic database and hopefully find the scholarly article it's based on. If you don't find it in one database, try another! Sometimes you'll need to combine a couple of clues to find the original article (for example, date of publication and journal title, or journal title and topic).

Article title
Journal title
Date of publication
Names of author(s)
Workplaces or affiliations of author(s) (What university do they work for? What labs do they work for?)
Study name--some larger research projects will have names that you can search for. For example, "Man Up Man Down" is the name of an extended project that studies health and stress in African American men in Michigan.
Topic--this is not always a good clue, because there may be many articles on the same topic. But it may help in combination with one or more of the other types of information.

Databases

Alternative Press Index and Archive
Covers journals, newspaper, and magazine articles from over 700 international alternative, radical, and left periodicals. Born of the New Left, the database was launched in 1969 to provide access to the emerging theories and practices of radical social change.
Alt HealthWatch
Alt Healthwatch is a full-text alternative health research database focused on complementary, holistic and integrated approaches to health care and wellness. It offers the latest information about the evolving practice of holistic medicine and therapies.
General Science Full Text
Provides full text from more than 100 periodicals dating as far back as 1995, in addition to indexing and abstracts for nearly 300 periodicals dating back to 1984. Subject coverage includes astronomy, biology, botany, chemistry, conservation, health & medicine, oceanography, physics, zoology and much more.
Nexis Uni
New interface for LexisNexis Academic. A comprehensive resource for U.S. and international companies as well as newspaper articles, transcripts and web news worldwide, along with legal materials from U.S. and international jurisdictions.
**To use Company Dossier, pop up blocker must be turned off.**

To construct and download in bulk full text corpora derived from newspapers, newswires and legal and trade publications from the LexisNexis Academic database, use Text Assembler.
PubMed (Medline)
1966-
MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences.

Note: Beginning June 1, 2021, users of NCBI services will need to login with their MSU Net ID instead of a NCBI-generated account. The NLM has more information about this change and how to link your existing NCBI account with your MSU Net ID. A Microsoft Word document containing step by step instructions is avaialble for download.
Scopus
Find citations for a broad range of scientific literature (including patents) and track, analyze and visualize citations by document, author, zip code, or institution.
Web of Science
Includes the Institute for Scientific Information Citation Indexes - Arts and Humanities, Social Science, and Science. It indexes science, social sciences, and arts and humanities information from nearly 9,300 of the most prestigious, high impact research journals in the world.
Food Science and Technology Abstracts (FSTA)
1969-
FSTA covers all areas of food science, food technology, and human nutrition, including basic food science, biotechnology, toxicology, packaging, and engineering. Some 1800 publications in over 40 languages are scanned regularly, including journals, reviews, standards, legislation, patents, books, theses, and conference proceedings.
Biological Abstracts
Biological Abstracts is a comprehensive reference database covering life sciences journal literature. It covers the following fields: Botany, Microbiology, Pharmacology, Biochemistry, Evolutionary ecology, Kinseology, Neurology, and Toxicology. Coverage from 1926 to the present. Web of Science platform.

MSU Libraries

Course Guides

LB 133 Spring 2021

Some Clues to Look for in Your Popular Source

Databases