If the scholarly literature on your research topic involves technical vocabulary or concepts 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 other encyclopedias related to your topic, enter some relevant keywords into the search box on the library homepage. Then add the word "encyclopedia" or "handbook" 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 using Google).
Note: If you click on an ebook link below and don't see the book's table of contents, click either "PDF" or "Full text finder" on the left side of the screen. the PDF will download a PDF for you directly. The full text finder will take you to another screen where you can click on a link to the book.Once you get to the book, there may be a box asking you to buy the title. Ignore this and scroll down to see the ebook. You may have to download the ebook, either as one file or chapter by chapter.
Concise Encyclopaedia of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology by These are more like general encyclopedias--they have short articles or books about almost any topic, not just evolution. Just use the search box on each page to look for your topic.
