Ventura College Library Guides: Biology: Websites

External Website Resources

Amphibiaweb
Information on amphibian declines, conservation, natural history, and taxonomy.
Biodiversity Heritage Library
38 million pages of open source pages from natural history and botanical libraries around the world.
BioLine
Provides access to peer-reviewed research journals published in developing countries.
more...less...
Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries
Cell Biology Animation
Animations on key biological processes, cell function overview, and more.
Darwin Online
Complete publications of Charles Darwin.
Encyclopedia of Life (EOL)
Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth.
Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
Searchable data on species, countries, or datasets.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI): BioInteractive
BioInteractive resources primarily focus on core concepts and processes in biology for high school and undergraduate students. This resource also provides interdisciplinary resources with connections to biology in earth and environmental science, chemistry, and math and statistics.
Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio)
National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC) funded by the National Science Foundation. Through ADBC, data and images for millions of biological specimens are being made available in electronic format for the research community, government agencies, students, educators, and the general public.
Invasive.org
Information on invasive species. 65,361 images of 3,431 invasive species.
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ is widely recognized as the most comprehensive, objective global approach for evaluating the conservation status of plant and animal species.
Learn.Genetics
Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center; includes teaching materials.
National Center for Biotechnology Information
The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information.
Plants Database
From the USDA. The PLANTS Database provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories.
PubMed
PubMed comprises more than 26 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.
Taxonomy Database
Contains the names and phylogenetic lineages of more than 160,000 organisms that have molecular data in the NCBI databases. New taxa are added to the Taxonomy database as data are deposited for them
The Tree of Life Web Project
A web project produced by biologists from around the world. Taxonomic and identifying information about organisms, including drawings, photographs, references, and related information.
Understanding Evolution
From Cal-Berkeley, "one-stop source" of information on evolution. Understanding Evolution is a non-commercial, education website, teaching the science and history of evolutionary biology. This site is here to help you understand what evolution is, how it works, how it factors into your life, how research in evolutionary biology is performed, and how ideas in this area have changed over time.

Advanced Internet Searching

Google is indeed your friend, but try these specialized tools for different, and probably more scholarly, results.

Science.gov - searches 200 million pages of "authoritative U.S. government science information"
JURN - searches millions of free, open access scholarly articles, chapters, and theses

Google Advanced Scholar Search - Search for scholarly articles.
Google Advanced Book Search - Search for books on your topic.

Adapted from PLNU Ryan Library

Free Biology Articles on the Web

PLOS Biology
Free, open source articles in biology and the life sciences

"PLOS Biology is an open-access, peer-reviewed general biology journal published by PLOS, a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource. New articles are published online weekly; issues are published monthly."

PLOS Biology stands for Public Library of Science, Biology

Adapted from PLNU Ryan Library

Evaluating Websites

Remember, anyone can publish anything online! Make sure you take a critical look at any websites you are considering using for your research!

Watch the video below and check out our Information Evaluation guide for more details.