If the scholarly literature on your research topic involves highly technical vocabulary that you haven't seen before, reference works can help. The MSU Libraries owns a number of these, and many of the recent ones are accessible online with your NetID. The box below contains a very small selection of the ones on evolution and computational biology. To find an encyclopedia related to your topic, enter some relevant keywords into the search box on the library homepage. Then add the word "encyclopedia" to the search. Chances are good you'll find something relevant. (The reference works that the library purchases are also written by scholars in the discipline, so overall they are more reliable than what you might find on the open web).
Concise Encyclopaedia of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology by 
