LIBRARY GUIDE TO BIO 3500 - General Microbiology

While articles from the sources below are not scholarly (i.e. you shouldn't cite them in your BIO 3500 Writing Assignment), they often provide a more general overview of the topic and link to primary literature articles. 

Microbiology-related blogs 

• MicrobeBlog - Blog by Society for Applied Microbiology
• The Tree of Life - Blog by Dr. Jonathan Eisen, professor at UC-Davis
• American Society for Microbiology blogs

Popular scientific new sources  

• The New York Times Science Section - leading US newspaper
• EurekAlert! - created by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
• Nature News - science news articles from Nature Publishing Group

Learn how to read scholarly, scientific journal articles efficiently in this three lesson tutorial. Throughout these lessons, you’ll have opportunities to check your understanding about the concepts discussed; these questions are all for practice and are ungraded. Once you’ve worked through these lessons, in order, you can take a quiz to test your knowledge -- a score of at least 80% will earn you the Reading Scholarly Articles badge.

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Web of Science  - database of scientific literature from all scientific disciplines 
Use the 'Add row' function to search for specific fields to fulfill the requirements of your Writing Assignment.

• Title or Topic: type in your keywords
• Year Published: type only the year of publication
• Document Type: select this option and then use type 'article' in the search box

Example Web of Science search: 


PubMed (MEDLINE)  - database for medical and biomedical literature
Using the Advanced Search function, select specific fields to fulfill the requirements of your Writing Assignment.

• Date - Publication: type in the exact publication dates in YYYY/MM/DD format
• Publication Type: click 'Show index list' and select 'journal article' 
• Title/Abstract: search for your keywords in only the title and abstract of the article

Example PubMed search

Primary literature articles are often called journal articles or research papers. Secondary literature articles are often called review articles, review papers or simply reviews. 

If after looking at these five differences, you don't know if your article is primary literature, contact your professor or your librarian!