Graduate General Studies - The World Wide Web

Using the World Wide Web - a Guide For Graduate Students

Searching the Literature

BIDS - The Bath Information & Data Services

Unfortunately, the BIDS gateway itself does not (yet) have its own WWW interface, although BIDS does have its own explanatory Web pages. You can however start a standard Telnet session to the BIDS gateway from within your browser (try it).

Literature databases you can access from the Web

For example, the National Center for Biological Information, USA serves the molecular biology subset of MEDLINE. (MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's database of biomedical articles, which costs money to access.) The NCBI also includes protein and nucleotide databases, as well as the molecular biology journals, and all are freely searchable using WWW Entrez.

TRY THIS: Clicking on the link below* will take you to the form with which you can search the molecular biology subset of MEDLINE. When you've got this form, click on the button next to "Search Field" (which initially says "Text Terms") and select "Author Name" instead. Click the mouse in the small text window underneath it (a cursor will appear) and type the following:

Goodfellow JM

after which press "Accept" (or the Return button on the keyboard). In response to any "Security Warning"-type message that you may get, just click on "Continue Submission". In response, you will get a page telling you how many documents have been found which match the query. Click on the button which says "Retrieve x documents" to see them.

*Now try it.

You can then view the abstracts of the individual articles; select "Citation format". Its then possible to make hyperlinks to individual articles from within your own documents, like this.

NCBI also provide an interface to the Medline Subset in Molecular Genetics at NCBI

Closer to home, you should also look at BioMedNet, which allows on-line access to abtracts and (for members) full texts of the Current Biology journals. Their Web server has very recently been reorganized so that you now need to log on to use it, which you can do as a guest if you are not a member. You will need to log in as a guest before the BioMedNet links below will work.

If you register before the end of the test period, you get free membership until the end of 1996.

BioMedNet plan to eventually include the complete MEDLINE database.

You can try searching the database by clicking here; and here's a sample abstract found as a result.

Here is a list of some on-line journals

E.g. here's the editorial of the current issue of Nature ; not all the text is on-line.

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