BIOSIS Citation Index deserves a better look and more use for so many good reasons.

BIOSIS Citation Index is huge! What MLA Bibliography is to language and literature, BIOSIS Citation Index is to the life sciences.

If you are passionate about:

or just about any nonmedical, biology topic, BIOSIS Citation Index has references to articles on your topic, and due to GSU’s extensive, eJournal collection, most of those articles are full text.

BIOSIS Citation Index is also surprisingly user friendly. It begins with a single basic box. Below that is a scroll box for eliminating older articles by selecting a start date. If you forget to only choose newer articles, an option box to the left of your results, gives you another chance to weed out older material. For those wishing to spread their searches into multiple rows, Add Another Field, converts the big box to a multibox form.

Of course synonyms, related opposites, AND to overlap topics, OR to combine synonyms, and “quotes” to keep phrases together are every bit as useful with BIOSIS Citation Index as they are in GALILEO’s Big (Discovery Search) Box. For more information on how to search BIOSIS Citation Index, there is a guide page to guide your searching step by step.

Full text article references in BIOSIS Citation Index have a link to Science Direct, and nearly all article references include a doi, digital object identifier. A doi is a relatively short, very stable set of numbers and letters that leads to an article, which is often full text due to GSU’s wide-ranging subscriptions. To find an article from BIOSIS Citation Index that does not have a full text link, copy its doi and paste it into a doi resolver. Most of the time, the article will be available as a full text PDF.

And yes, material featured in BIOSIS Citation Index is scholarly and technically sophisticated, but material that is "not for everybody" does NOT always mean "not for you." If you are fiercely interested in any nonmedical aspect of the life sciences, then finding articles that are exactly on your topic, can make learning a new vocabulary and wading through dry prose worth the effort. Just remember, if you need scholarly, nonmedical life science articles on almost any topic, BIOSIS Citation Index has the breadth and depth for you, and it is easier to search than you think.