- Gather keywords when you perform background research
- Search and browse through registries, indexes and controlled vocabulary resources like the CAS Registry via SciFinder or MESH.
- Use both keywords and index terms when searching
- Use Boolean operators to broaden (OR) or narrow (AND, NOT) your search
- Use wildcards to truncate search terms (often *) in order to capture search results with variations on a word stem (e.g. biomechanic*)
- Quickly review the "Help" resources for the database you are searching
Journals frequently used at Lehigh University in chemical/bioengineering research.
Helps find current articles that cite earlier work. Covers STEM, social sciences, & arts and humanities. Has an emerging sources citation index. Useful for identifying review articles Note: Web of Science generally does not include conference proceedings in search results.
Major resource for chemistry research. Many capabilities it provides includes searching chemical literature, plus substance, reaction, structure searching, and property searching. Set up instructions can be found here.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources. (Note: To maximize access to Lehigh resources, when in Google Scholar, go to Settings, then Library links. Type in Lehigh University and select the check box next to “Lehigh University - Lehigh Links.” If we do not subscribe to an article, this setting will enable a Lehigh Link to obtain the article via other access or interlibrary loan.)
Links to PDFs when available; excellent for finding specific articles or books.
PubMed comprises more than 23 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
PubMed also includes links to resources and tools from The National Center for Biotechnology Information, which gives access to biomedical and genomic information.
Use Interlibrary Loan to request a PDF of an article that isn't available at Lehigh or a scanned PDF of a print article that Lehigh owns. You will get an email when the article is ready for download.
These magazines feature short, less jargon-laden articles, and are written for practicioners in core and related fields. If you're still sorting through topic ideas, magazines are a good place to start looking.