Finding Journal Articles
There are several ways to find journal articles at the UI Libraries. Here are some useful tools. For assistance, please ask a librarian.
- InfoHawk+If you know the title of the article you're looking for, search for it in InfoHawk+
- Citation LinkerIf you have all or part of the citation for the article you're looking for, use the Citation Linker to find it quickly.
- Alphabetical List of DatabasesIf you want to browse through some journal articles by author, topic or keyword, use one or more of these databases. This is a huge list of over 650 databases, so check out the Databases box for some recommendations.
- Interlibrary LoanIf the Library doesn't have the article you're looking for, request it via Interlibrary Loan and we'll get it for you from another library.
Biology Databases
Find biology articles in scholarly journals and magazines with these databases and indexes. Look for 
in search results to link to full text resources (when available). For assistance please ask a librarian.
- National Center for Biotechnology InformationThe National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information.
- PubMed This link opens in a new window(For UI students, faculty and staff) PubMed comprises more than 21 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
- PubMed Central This link opens in a new window(For comunity users) PMC is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
- BIOSIS Citation Index This link opens in a new windowLife sciences and biomedical research covering pre-clinical and experimental research, methods and instrumentation, animal studies, and more.
- BioCyc Database Collection This link opens in a new windowBioCyc is a collection of 13075 Pathway/Genome Databases (PGDBs), plus software tools for exploring them [Karp17]. Key aspects of BioCyc data:
Quality data curated from tens of thousands of publications, including curated databases for E. coli, B. subtilis, H. sapiens, and S. cerevisiae.
Computationally predicted metabolic pathways and operons.
Data integrated from other databases including gene essentiality, regulatory networks, protein features, and GO annotations. - Faculty Opinions (formerly Faculty of 1000/F1000 Prime) This link opens in a new windowFaculty Opinions is an article recommendation service, providing up-to-date notifications and information about science you shouldn’t miss.
Our global virtual Faculty of over 8000 leading experts from across the life sciences, health and physical sciences recommend articles they consider to be highly important to others working both in their field and beyond.
We started out with a Faculty of 1000 experts in 2002 but, owing to the high demand for curated content of a rapidly expanding scientific literature, we expanded both Faculty Opinions’s coverage and its Faculty.
Today, Faculty Opinions has more than 40 Faculties, covering research from basic and fundamental, to clinical application and social and behavioral sciences. In addition, a substantial body of recommended content provides insight into science and research policy and practice. - JoVE Unlimited This link opens in a new windowEncompasses all current and future JoVE video resources. JoVE publishes more than 1,200 videos annually across the 13 sections of the JoVE Video Journal and launches new subject series and collections to the JoVE Science Education Library several times a year. Access to both the fundamental building blocks of common laboratory techniques and the newest, cutting-edge experiments
- Combined Chemical Dictionary This link opens in a new windowIncludes descriptive and numerical data on chemical, physical and biological properties of compounds; systematic and common names of compounds; literature references; structure diagrams and their associated connection tables. Contains all those compounds published in: Dictionary of organic compounds (200,000 records), Dictionary of natural products (120,000 records), Dictionary of inorganic and organometallic compounds (90,000 records), Dictionary of pharmacological agents (30,000 records), Dictionary of analytical reagents (14,000 records).
- Biological Abstracts This link opens in a new windowBiological Abstracts (1969 - 2006 coverage) encompasses the entire field of life sciences and provides comprehensive coverage of the world's published biological and biomedical research. This includes traditional areas of biology, such as botany, zoology and microbiology, as well as experimental, clinical and veterinary medicine, biotechnology, environmental studies, and agriculture. Interdisciplinary fields such as biochemistry, biophysics and bioengineering are also included. More than 6,500 serials are monitored for inclusion.
- BioMed Central This link opens in a new windowBioMed Central is an independent publishing organization committed to providing immediate and free access to peer reviewed biomedical research.
- BioOne Complete This link opens in a new windowBioOne Complete is a database of more than 200 subscribed and open-access titles in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences.
- Zoological Record This link opens in a new windowThe world’s leading taxonomic reference and oldest continuing database of animal biology.
- Bioline International This link opens in a new windowProvides access to quality research journals published in developing and transitional countries. The periodicals included cover all subject areas, with the majority in the life and medical sciences. Most journals are in English and Spanish. The website provides a search engine that covers all articles in all journals, while users can retrieve articles in both HTML and PDF formats. All material is available on an open-access (free) basis.
- Biology CommonsFind full-text articles in biology and other related disciplines submitted by scholars at 112 institutions, including the University of Iowa.
- bioRxiv This link opens in a new windowbioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”) is a preprint server for the life sciences operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Articles are not peer-reviewed or edited, although all articles undergo basic screening for non-scientific content and plagiarism, and for material that might pose a health or biosecurity risk.
General Science Databases
Find science articles in scholarly journals and magazines with these databases and indexes. Look for in search results to link to full text resources (when available). For assistance please ask a librarian.
- Academic Search Elite This link opens in a new windowThis multi-disciplinary database offers full text for nearly 2,000 scholarly journals, including more than 1,500 peer-reviewed titles. Covering virtually every area of academic study, Academic Search Elite offers full text information dating as far back as 1985. This database is updated on a daily basis.
- arXiv.org This link opens in a new windowCollection of electronic pre-prints in various sciences. The archive is based upon activities supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under agreement with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and by the U.S. Department of Energy.
- Ei Engineering Village This link opens in a new windowEngineering Village is a Web-based information service that offers a wide range of quality resources for information specialists, professionals, and researchers working in the applied science and engineering fields.
- JSTOR (Journal Storage) This link opens in a new windowProvides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, philosophy, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Consult the online tables of contents for holdings, as coverage varies for each title. Note that this database contains ONLY back issues. Journals may be searched across multiple titles as well as by the individual titles below. The JSTOR database does NOT include full-text of the most recent 3 to 5 years.
- MasterFILE Premier This link opens in a new windowProvides full text for nearly 1,950 general reference publications with full text information dating as far back as 1975. Also includes 500 full text reference books, nearly 100,000 biographies, 86,000 primary source documents, and an image collection of 188,000 photos, maps and flags. This database is updated daily.
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global (PQDT Global) This link opens in a new windowProQuest Dissertations and Theses (Full Text) is the world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. The official digital dissertations archive for the Library of Congress and the database of record for graduate research. It includes 2.4 million dissertation and theses citations from around the world from 1861 to the present day together with 1 million full text dissertations that are available for download in PDF format. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and strong retrospective full text coverage for older graduate works. [Not compatible with Internet Explorer 9]
- PubMed This link opens in a new windowProvides access to bibliographic information in Medline and other sources.
- Science.govScience.gov searches over 55 databases and over 2100 selected websites from 13 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results.
- OSTI.GOV (Previously called: SciTech Connect) This link opens in a new windowYour connection to science, technology, and engineering research information from the U.S. Department of Energy. SciTech Connect consolidates the contents of OSTI's Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database.
- Scopus This link opens in a new windowScopus is the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. It contains 47 million records, 70% with abstracts and over 19,500 titles from 5,000 publishers worldwide. It also includes over 4.6 million conference papers, 100% Medline coverage, and interoperability with Engineering Village and Reaxys. In addition, Scopus offers sophisticated tools to track, analyze and visualize research.
- Web of ScienceA citation reference that includes the Web of Science (Science Citation Index, 1899-present, the Social Science Citation Index, 1898-present, and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present), Book Citation Index- Science (2005-present), Book Citation Index- Social Sciences & Humanities (2005-present), Medline and Journal Citation Reports, among other science and social science reference indexes. [Not compatible with Internet Explorer 9]
Other Databases
- AGRICOLA (USDA National Agricultural Library)Index to journal articles and catalog to other publications on all aspects agriculture and allied disciplines, including animal and veterinary sciences, entomology, plant sciences, forestry, aquaculture and fisheries, farming and farming systems, agricultural economics, extension and education, food and human nutrition, and earth and environmental sciences.
- Bibliography of Systematic Mycology (CABI)A survey of the literature encompassing the biodiversity, classification, distribution, evolution, identification, nomenclature, phylogeny, systematics and taxonomy of fungi (including yeasts, lichens, chromistan fungi, protozoan fungi and fossil forms), searchable by cited generic names or author names.
- Bio-ProtocolCreated by Stanford researchers, bio-protocol is a freely available peer-reviewed e-journal/database of protocols in the life sciences. Its mission is to make life-science research more efficient and reproducible by curating and hosting high quality, open-access, life science protocols.
- Biodiversity Heritage LibraryA consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.” BHL also serves as the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).
- Botanicus.orgBotanicus is a freely accessible portal to historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Botanicus is made possible through support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, W.M. Keck Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
- Fungi Online (Systematic Mycology and Microbiology Labratory, ARS, USDA)Searchable databases, including Specimens in the U.S. National Fungus Collections, Fungus-Host Distributions, Literature Guide for the Identification of Plant Pathogenic Fungi, Nomenclature, Index to Saccardo's Sylloge Fungorum, and International Mycological Institute's Index of Fungi.
- GreenFILE This link opens in a new windowA freely accessible research database focusing on the relationship between human beings and the environment, with well-researched but accessible information on topics ranging from global warming to recycling to alternate fuel sources and beyond.
- Index to American Botanical LiteratureThe searchable database includes all those entries published in the index since 1996, and thus includes botanical literature appearing since late 1995. Deals with various aspects of extant and fossil American plants and fungi.
- Kew Bibliographic DatabasesA combined searching tool that provides access to three bibliographic databases: KR — The Kew Record of Taxonomic Literature, PMBD — the Plant Micromorphological Bibliographic Database and EBBD — the Economic Botany Bibliographic Database.
- PAN Pesticides DatabaseToxicity and regulatory information from Pesticide Action Network.