Ask a Librarian
Starting a Search
These directions apply to both Biological Abstracts and Science Citation Index.
- This shows which database you are searching.
- This drop-down menu indicates which field you are searching. Topic, the default option, searches titles, abstracts, and author-supplied keywords.
- Enter your keywords. You can use "quotation marks" around your terms to search for an exact phrase.
- By default, Add date range uses the Index Date, which is when the article was added to the database. Most users would find Publication Date to be more useful.
Viewing Results List
- Use the Refine results column to narrow your results. This can be particularly useful if you have a lot of results. Some of the most useful filters are publication year, document types, and major concepts.
- By default, results will be sorted by Relevance.
- Each result lists the title of the article, authors, journal title, publication date, and a few lines of the abstract.
- Click Show more to view the entire abstract on the search results page.
Finding Full Text
Biological Abstracts, Science Citation Index, and other Web of Science databases do not include the full text of articles, but they do include links to help you get to the full text.
- For all articles, you should see a Find It! button. Click this to check to see if the article is available in the library's subscriptions.
- If the full text is available, there will be a link to access it immediately.
- If the full text is not available in the library's subscriptions, you can request it through interlibrary loan for free. This generally takes 1-3 business days.
If an article is open access, Web of Science may also include a link to view the full text from the publisher or another source. For a consistent experience, we recommend always using the Find It button.