530581 Cellular Biochemistry Prof. S. Springer

How to search for specific scientific information

For this course, you may have to look for information yourself, in addition to the material that is given in the reader. For example, you might wish to inform yourself more thoroughly on MHC class I-like molecules or neutrophils or CD8 than we have material for.

In these cases, there are the following options:

• Look in advanced textbooks like "Molecular Biology of the Cell" or "Immunology" (by William Paul) that are available in the IRC. Standard textbooks will often not contain enough material for this course.
• Look in the articles that are in the reader for references to review articles. Often, our articles refer to other articles that treat some aspects in more detail. Then, obtain those articles (see below).
• Search for information in the scientific databases. Be aware that if you just 'google' for information you may come up with sites that are not scientifically correct or even misleading, as there is no quality control on Google results.

To search scientific databases for information, you have the following options:

• PubMed: the most important internet database in the life sciences.

• At (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed).
• Type a query word into the box, and then click on the 'review' tab to limit the searches to just review articles.
• Go down from the top (the newest articles are on top).
• Click on the articles to see the abstract, and if you like one article, retrieve it (see below).
• Google Scholar:
• (http://scholar.google.com/)
• Allows searching through the entire text of all articles - so it is much superior to PubMed;
• But it works only for only those articles that are available to it (i.e., which are in the public domain), which is just a fraction of the total.

Retrieving your article:

• Click through directly from PubMed or Google Scholar - in many journals, the content is free before the publication date, and after six months. In addition, JU has many subscriptions which are usually automatically recognized by the journal's computer.
• You can also, of course, go directly to the journal websites (e.g. http://www.jcb.org/).
• If that does not work, try Jacobs University's "CitationLinker" at http://sfx7.exlibrisgroup.com:3210/jacobs/cgi/core/citation-linker.cgi?, and choose "Interlibrary Loan" if the article turns out not to be directly available. You will receive a printout within about a week.

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