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Biological Sciences Libraries

Finding books

All our books can be found through the online searching tool, iDiscover. The entry will also state whether the item is held in the Plant Sciences Library, and may include results for the Cory & Herbarium Library due to our connected collections.

Finding journals

You can also use iDiscover to check whether this library holds a journal, or if it is available in another library in Cambridge. The Plant Sciences Library holds a considerable number of titles as paper copies, some of which may not be available electronically.

The results will also indicate if we have electronic access. Alternatively, you can go straight to the e-journals section on the e-resources page  to check electronic access.

Finding references to papers

Recommended databases for the biosciences include: PubMedWeb of Science, and Scopus but we have access to many more. Don't forget to use several databases if you want to get a wide sweep of what is availablein your research area and consider using additional tools such as Google Scholar to widen your reach even further.

Getting organised

It is advisable to organise the information you find, right from the beginning of any research undertaken. A reference manager tool is a great way to help with this and there are a number of options available out there, including: 

  • Zotero works easily with PubMed, Google Scholar and many other databases
  • Mendeley works easily with Google Scholar, PubMed and a number of other major databases.

Subject guides

For further help, you might also like to try LibGuides, which provide subject-specific guidance - the Plant Sciences LibGuide is at: http://libguides.cam.ac.uk/plantsciences

There are also many other useful Libguides, for example on referencing, plagiarism, reference management - see the list at: http://libguides.cam.ac.uk/