Bioscience & Environmental Bioscience: Using websites

Try the BASE academic search engine, it is especially good at finding open access sources

Search ChemSpider for over 30 million chemical structures

Use GoPubMed to search for biomedical information  - you'll get results faster than searching directly in Pubmed

Google Scholar looks and feels like Google Search, but the results are different because it searches scholarly papers instead of general websites.

You can link Google Scholar to DkIT Library's resources to make it easier to find material we have available.

To do this in Google Scholar, click Settings, then click Library links. Type in "Dundalk Institute of Technology" and click the Search icon. DkIT should appear in the list. Put a tick beside it and click Save.

The advantages of Web sources :

• easy to access
• easy to find
• up-to-date ( always check that site has been recently updated)

But... ! Anyone can publish on the web, so it's important to evaluate the information you find by looking at:

1. Who?   Who is the author? Is he/she a qualified expert with academic credentials and other publication in the subject?
2. Why?   Why was it written? Is it fact based, opinion based? Is it intended to educate, inform, entertain, sell something?
3. Where?   Where did the information come from? Is it a popular press publication, an academic publication, or something else?
4. When?   When was it written? Has it been updated? Do newer editions or revisions exist?

Check our Evaluating Your Sources Guide for more tips.

Here's some good advice on conducting scientific research on the internet

Evaluating information from the web

Consider these criteria when looking for information on web sites: