Use Google Scholar? Make it more effective by linking it to the Library's journal subscriptions!
Go to Google Scholar; Click on Settings, then Library Links; type in "Sonoma State University," check the box and save. Your search results will now include a FindIt@SSU link. Click on FindIt for full-text articles at SSU Library.
These resources are the First Stop for biology research articles:
Citation index to agriculture literature, including animal & veterinary sciences, entomology, plant sciences, wine, forestry, aquaculture & fisheries, farming & farming systems, agricultural economics, extension & education, food & human nutrition, and earth & environmental sciences (National Agricultural Library / NAL).
Provides full text of articles from 100+ journals dating back to 1997, as well as indexing and abstracts of more than 380 publications. Subject coverage includes agriculture & agricultural research, atmospheric science, biochemistry, biology, biotechnology, botany, chemistry, environmental science, geology, marine biology microbiology, physics, and much more (via Ebsco).
Important journal and information resource for the basic biological and physical sciences.
A leading journal of original scientific research, global news, and commentary. Includes ScienceNow, the consumer-focused publication; ScienceCareers and other supporting material.
Provides full-text access to journals in the science and social sciences. Included are journals from a host of scientific societies and scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishers.
Provides information on 8,375 currently recognized California vascular plant species, including over 800,000 records of plant observations and 20,000 photographs.
A full-text database covering agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, renewable energy sources, natural resources, marine & freshwater science, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, and more.
Offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment with scholarly, government and general-interest titles including content on the environmental effects of individuals, corporations and local/national governments, and what can be done at each level to minimize these effects (via Ebsco).
IEEE Xplore is an online delivery system providing full text access to the world's highest quality technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics.
Comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses, with over 1.9 million in full text format.
Full-text of high-impact bioscience research journals, most of which are published by small societies and non-commercial publishers.
Open access is the “free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment” (SPARC). Open access can be attained via two primary paths: publishing in an open access journal (Gold) or retaining author’s copyright and posting a copy of the article to an institutional repository or subject repository (Green).
Benefits of open access include:
Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages
Bibliometrics: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, bibliometrics deals "with the application of mathematical and statistical analysis to bibliography; the statistical analysis of books, articles, or other publications."
Altmetrics (alternative metrics) are nontraditional metrics proposed as an alternative to the more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index.
Impact factors can be applied to journals or to individual articles. According to Journal Citation Reports, "The journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year," although other time spans can be calculated.
Citation analysis examines the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in articles and books, using citations in scholarly works to establish links to other works or other researchers. Identifying the number of times an article is cited by others is considered the "impact factor" for that article.
The following select biology journals had high ranking Impact Factors in the 2016 Scientific Journal Rankings report. The links will take you to the online resources available through the SSU Library.
Annual Review of Plant Biology