BIOS 4723 Virology: Databases/Articles

When you use Google to search for information (as we all do) you are searching a vast database of webpages which includes everything from serious research articles to amusing cat videos. You can find quality research using Google but you will often have to sift through a lot of non-scholarly or unreliable pages in order to find it. 

UNO Library subscribes to hundreds of research databases and thousands of electronic journals on various topics. Why would we bother to do this when research articles can be located using Google? When you search the internet using Google you may run into some good sources amongst everything else on the internet. When you search a research database you are searching a collection of scholarly research articles from the most important journals in that particular field. So, for instance if you do a search for 'Zika Virus' in MEDLINE you will only retrieve citations for legitimate, vetted articles in the Medical/Biomedical field of study.  You will not bring up ads, entertainment, commercial or opinion-based websites. For some topics, Google will be the best place to look (ex: finding the best price on car insurance, the lineup for VooDoo Fest, parade route maps). When you need to find scholarly research articles, a research database is usually the best place to start.

Research databases also allow you to apply certain limits to your results which you can't do in Google or Google Scholar. You can exclude review articles if you wish, limit your study to a certain age range of patient, gender or type of research animal used, date range, etc. Look below the search boxes on the main page of the database to see the possibilities. 

Below are the research databases with coverage on the topic of Virology. If you are accessing them from off-campus you will need to login. Information about remote access is here: http://libguides.uno.edu/remote