Introduction

This is an overview of the resources and services of the Purdue University Libraries. There is also some additional information on resources for biomedical research that are external to Purdue, e.g. The National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Purdue Libraries Home Page

The PULSIS Home Page 🔗 is your starting point to PULSIS resources.

Library Hours

Library hours vary by location and day of the week. Check the website for more information. 🔗

Purdue University School of Information Studies

The School of Information Studies 🔗 is part of the Libraries. Additional information about the faculty, research, and academic programming can be found on this site.

Libraries’ Faculty

Every department on campus has a faculty liaison librarian with subject area expertise. If you have question that cannot be answered by Dig Ref, please contact our liaison librarian.

You can find a list of faculty librarians and their subject areas on our Libraries Faculty by Subject page 🔗.

We have several librarians that have subject areas expertise that may be relevant to your research. You can find more information about the faculty here 🔗.

Here is a list of faculty that specialize in areas related to the life sciences.

Finding Resources

The Libraries’ website is complicated. Here are a few resources that can be difficult to find.

Databases

Many important resources are listed as a database 🔗, e.g. PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus (more below). However, other important resources are under databases as well. Note, it can be important to use the Purdue link to many of these resources to easily get access to the information that you need.

Protocols

A search for “protocols” in the databases found the following two important resources.

  • Current Protocols,🔗

  • Spring Nature Experiments, 🔗

Resources for Bioinformatics

Prof. Pete Pascuzzi maintains a reseach guide for bioinformatics.

Bioinformatics, 🔗

Resources for Chemistry

Prof. Dave Zwicky maintains a research guide for information on resources for chemistry that may be important for your research.

Chemical Information Resources, 🔗

Resources for Pharmacy

Prof. Jason Read maintains a research guide for drug information.

Drug Information. 🔗

Resources for Life Science Research (not on Library site)

Nature Points of Significance 🔗

A series of concise articles on statistics and data science for researchers.

NIH Data Sharing Repositories

Research data generated by NIH projects must be shared in the appropriate repository.

Domain Specific 🔗
Other Data Resources 🔗
General 🔗

Other Data Repositories

Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), 🔗
The gene expression omnibus contains many datasets for gene expression and genomics.

Dryad, 🔗
Dryad is popular with scientist in many disciplines.

FigShare, 🔗
FigShare contains research data from a variety of sources and is often the home for supplemental data from journal articles.

Purdue University Research Repository (PURR), 🔗
PURR has research data and tools and resources to help you manage your data.

Searching the Scientific Literature

The Library Search (START YOUR SEARCH HERE) platform aggregates most of our electronic and print resources. However, it does not have 100% coverage for important databases such as PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus.

A Library Search may be sufficient in some cases, e.g. coursework. However, for your thesis research you should access the databases directly. For research in the Life Sciences, you should search a minimum of three databases:

  • PubMed or Medline (same data different interface)
  • Web of Science
  • Scopus
  • Google Scholar

The key to using these resources effectively is to access these resources as a Purdue user. This should happen automatically when your are on campus, but you need to be more deliberate off campus.

See the page on Off-Campus Access 🔗

In general, follow these guidelines

  • Access the databases from the PUL Databases page 🔗.
  • Link Google Scholar to the Purdue University Libraries.
  • DO NOT EXPECT TO ACCESS JOURNAL ARTICLES FROM THE JOURNAL WEBSITE. Access to journal articles is complicated by issues that effect access.

PubMed

PubMed is likely the most useful database for biomedical research. Make sure that you bookmark the PUL link, Pub Med 🔗.

This will enable the FIND IT Purdue Libries link.

Web of Science

Web of Science has better coverage of resources for agricultural research. Again, use the PUL link, Web of Science 🔗. (You might need to go through the PUL Database page directly 🔗).

One caution with Web of Science, the Topics searches Title, Abstract, Author Keywords and Keywords Plus. The latter is a new feature that can make your search too broad. You may get more precise results if you search Title, Abstract and Author Keywords directly.

Google Scholar

Opinions of Google Scholar are mixed (at least as a systematic search engine). However, you will almost certainly use it, so you should link it to the Purdue Libraries.

Go to Google Scholar 🔗. Click on the “hamburger icon”, ☰ , at the upper left corner.

Click on Settings.

Click on Library Links

Search for and select, Purdue University West Lafayette.

You should now see a Full Text at Purdue link next to your search results.

Inter Library Loan

The Libraries’ is currently rethinking how we provide Purdue with the resources that we need. One aspect of this is to minimize our subscriptions to expensive journals and databases. This does not mean that you do not have access. Almost any item can be requested by Inter Library Loan (ILL) 🔗.

To request an item by ILL, you can search for the item in our catalog. (Yes, you can find items that we do not own). The page for the resource should have a link to request via ILL if your are signed in (or on campus).

Currently, ILL is not circulating physical items. They will try to procure an electronic copy for you. Turnaround time varies, but you may get your item in 24 hours.

Citation Management

You should begin using Citation Management software ASAP. The decision on which software to use may depend on your research group. If your thesis adviser uses EndNote, then you will likely need to use the same. Other options include Zotero and Mendeley. You can create an EndNote Basic account with Web of Science. This is a web-based version of EndNote.

PUL maintains a guide for Citation Management, 🔗. Workshops are offered periodically.

Manage your Professional Profile

ORCiD

There are many tools that can help you to manage your professional profile, e.g. LinkedIn. It can be very important to manage your publications as well. Google Scholar can help with this, but all of you should register with ORCiD, 🔗 to help you unambiguously manage your publications. Many journals now request your ORCiD ID for publications.

If you don’t have an ORCiD ID yet, do it soon! This profile belongs to you!

Web of Science Author Profiles

Web of Science creates author profiles from their bibliometric data. It is important to create and account so that you can claim and help to manage your profile! The Web of Science Profile belongs to Web of Science!

Scopus Author Profiles

These are similar to Web of Science. You can help them manage the profile, but it belongs to Scopus.

Research Data Sharing and Management

Most external funding agency require at least some level of data sharing as well as data management plans.

Purdue e-Pubs

Purdue e-Pubs 🔗 is a platform for open access publishing. Possible uses include:

In all cases, publication rights must be considered, and Purdue e-Pubs can help.
Importantly, the Office for Research and Partnerships 🔗 maintains a collection of documents that describe University Resources. These documents are very useful if you need to write a proposal.

School of Information Studies Courses and Certificates

PULSIS faculty teach courses in departments across campus. Recently, we have started to develope our own courses for the School of Information Studies. The course prefix is ILS, Information and Library Science.

Check the latest ILS Course Offerings 🔗

How to Assess a Scientific Paper

Quality of Journal

Scientific publishing is generally a for-profit endeavor. Many “predatory” journals may be willing to publish your work. However, many of these journals are not legitimate. How can you tell the difference?

Is the Journal Indexed by Medline, Web of Science or Scopus?

NLM, PubMed and Medline

You can search the National Library of Medicine 🔗 for indexed journals

Surpringly, you will retrieve articles from uncommon journals with a PubMed search. If the journal is not familiar to you, you can search NLM for information on the journal.

Web of Science

You can also use Web of Science to assess the quality of the journal. From your search results, click on the name of a journal, and the statistics for that journal will appear in a new window.

You can also browse Web of Science indexed journals with Journal Citation Reports, 🔗

It can be useful to browse journals by Web of Science categories, but this can be complicated because research articles are frequently published in journals that accept a wide variety of research, e.g. Nature and Science, so a category-specific journal might not be the best place to publish your research or find the article that you need. However, JCR does have 72 journals categorized as Chemistry > Chemistry, Medicinal and 354 journals categorized as Chemistry/Biology & Biochemistry > Pharmacology & Pharmacy. It can be helpful to browse these lists when search for a journal.

Scopus

Scopus also has metrics to help you judge a journal, and they also maintain a database of Sources 🔗. Scopus has a journal-level subject area categorization system. There is no area for Medicinal Chemistry, but there are many areas that are relevant such as Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics > Drug Discovery which has 255 journals.

Purdue University College of Pharmacy Top Journals (a preliminary analysis)

An Advanced search of Web of Science was performed for addresses associated with Departments in the College of Pharmacy. About 2500 indexed publications were discovered for 2013 - 2023.

The journals were ranked based by number of publications and the top 20 are shown if the figure below.

articles
articles

To help understand the impact of articles in the above journals, a boxplot of article citations is shown.

boxplot
boxplot

For elite journals, there are fewer articles but these articles can be highly cited! Below is a barplot that shows the total number of citations to these journals.

total
total

Quality of Scientific Articles

There are many articles, websites or blogs that have opinions on how to assess a published article.

  • Guidelines Project 🔗

  • du Prel, et al 🔗

  • Colorado State Library 🔗

Here are things that I look for:

Journal Impact Factor

  • Don’t get hung up on the impact factor of a journal. The majority of Cell, Nature or Science papers are great, but you are more likely to find useful information or data in lower tier journals because there is simply more published research in these journals. It is important that your research is discoverable so make sure that the journal is indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE, Web of Science, or Scopus.

Title

  • Is the title clear and concise and free of exaggeration?

Abstract

  • Can I tell from the abstract whether the article is relevant to my research?

Keywords or MeSH Terms

  • Do the authors provide relevant keywords for the research?
  • For PubMed, what are the relevant MeSH Terms? 🔗

Introduction

  • Is the introduction clearly written with appropriate citations?
  • Does it present more that one side of a particular research question?

Methods and Materials

  • Is there sufficient detail that I could in theory reproduce the described experiments?
  • Are statistical methods described, especially with regards to experimental design?
  • Are protocols and data shared?

Results

  • Are figures easy to interpret with clear labels and legends?
  • When appropriate, are statistics used to show that the results are significantly different?

Discussion

  • Do the authors provide a balanced interpretation of their results?
  • Are opposing views or alternative explanations included?

Other Issues

  • Was the paper easy to access?, i.e. the journal is open access or the library subscribes.
  • What was the peer review process for the article?
  • Are there potential conflicts of interest?
  • Was the paper shared in a preprint repository such as arXiv. 🔗
  • Do the authors have a retraction history, check Retraction Watch 🔗 or Retraction Watch Database 🔗

Other Opinions?