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Biology

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Articles Types

This is a guide to the major resources for the biological and life sciences here at Boston College

Is it peer-reviewed?

Some databases will have a box on the search page which you can select to limit your results to  peer-reviewed journal articles.  Others may have a tab on the results page for "scholarly articles."  If the database doesn't identify the journals as peer-reviewed, you can look the journal up in Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory.  Ulrich's identifies peer-reviewed (refereed) journals with this icon:

Review Articles

Review articles provide an overview of a given topic, highlighting the major works and providing many key references. These articles range from very broad coverage to highly specialized areas of research. Review articles may appear in many different types of journals, often interspersed with primary research articles. Review journals, a special type of journal, restrict their content to review articles. Examples of just a few of the review journals in the Boston College Libraries include:

  • Annual Review of Biochemistry
  • Current Opinion in Chemical Biology
  • Nature Reviews: Genetics
  • Trends in Immunology
  • ... and many others (most of the titles listed above provide just one example from a given publisher)

Search for review articles, wherever they are published, by using the various journal article databases. All of them allow you to limit your searching to review articles.