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Biology Research Guide: Web resources

Resources for biology students. Contact us at the Reference Desk for help with your library research, by phone at (819) 822-9600, ext. 2608 or by email at reference@ubishops.ca

Evaluating web sites

Not all information found on the World Wide Web is reliable or accurate. To help you decide which web sites to trust, try looking at the following 5 criteria.

  1. Who is the sponsor of the site? What organization or individual created the site? Is the site biased?
  2. Who is the author of the information? Is the author identified and are credentials given?
  3. What is the purpose of the site? Is it intended to educate, inform, influence views or sell a product?
  4. What is the coverage? Is the material relevant, accurate, and complete? Are the sources documented? Can the information be verified from other sources?
  5. Is the information current? Is it clear when the site was created, or when it was last updated? If there are links to other sites, are the links still active?

Biology web resources

BiologyBrowser Free biology resources from Thomson Reuters.

BioMed Central All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.

Bishop's University Department of Biology

Ducks Unlimited

The Johnville Bog 

National Research Press Journals Provides free access to backfiles of 16 scientific journals published by the National Research Council of Canada.

PubMed A service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 18 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to 1948.

Theses Canada Portal  Canadian theses and dissertations.

Tree of Life web project  Provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history (phylogeny).

U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information A U.S. national resource for molecular biology information, including public databases, genome data, and biomedical information.

For more information

There are many guides to evaluating internet resources freely available on the web (for example at the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries web site, and the Owl at Purdue),

or see Cite it right, by Tom Fox, Julia Johns, and Sarah Keller, found in the Reference Room.

 Product Details

PN 171 .F56 F69 2007 Ref