This web page will step you through the process of identifying, locating, evaluating, and citing journal articles and other information that you may need for this course. The most effective way to identify relevant articles appearing in the primary literature is to search appropriate indexing and abstracting services. Indexes and abstracts differ in the amount of information they provide about an identified article.
Indexes provide a basic citation for an article.
Abstracts provide all of the above plus anywhere from a few sentences to a paragraph or more of text that describes more fully the content of the publication. Abstracting sources can potentially save you time during your search provided the abstracting source covers the subject areas that you are interested in. FirstSearch Most indexes and abstracts in the biological sciences available at Grinnell are accessed electronically through FirstSearch . FirstSearch can be accessed through the telnet version of the library catalog . FirstSearch You are then prompted for your name, library barcode number and password.