FirstSearch Databases

FirstSearch is one of the "Commercial Databases" found via the Liberty menu --an array of more than 50 specialized tools which share (more or less) a single interface, and which allow you to e-mail records to yourself. A few databases have full text available, but most of the ones you're likely to use are basically bibliographic: their records will tell you about articles, sometimes even including an abstract and usually including descriptors and identifiers from the database's controlled vocabulary of subject terms. Getting the most out of FirstSearch does take some practise, but it's not notably hostile.

You'll probably have most use for the databases found under 9 and 10: 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * Topic Area Selection * * * * * * * * * * * *
___NO.__TOPIC AREA_____________________NO.__TOPIC AREA
|
|   1   Arts & Humanities               8   General Science
|   2   Business & Economics            9   Life Sciences
|   3   Conferences & Proceedings       10  Medicine & Health
|   4   Consumer Affairs & People       11  News & Current Events
|   5   Education                       12  Public Affairs & Law
|   6   Engineering & Technology        13  Social Sciences
|   7   General & Reference             14  All Databases
|______________________________________________________
I've asterisk'd (*) the databases I think will be most useful for Bio182 purposes: 
TOPIC AREA:  Life Sciences
 __NO.__DATABASE__________DESCRIPTION_______________
|
|   1   WorldCat          Books and other materials in libraries worldwide.
|   2   Article1st        Index of articles from nearly 12,500 journals.
|   3   Contents1st       Table of contents of nearly 12,500 journals.
|   4   FastDoc           Index of articles with text online or by email.
|   5   NetFirst          OCLC database of Internet resources.
| * 6   AGRICOLA          Materials relating to all aspects of agriculture.
| * 7   BasicBIOSIS       A wide range of bioscience topics.
| * 8   BioDigest         Non-technical digests in biology, ecology & health.
| * 9   BiolAgrIndex      Leading publications in agriculture and biology.


TOPIC AREA:  Medicine & Health
 __NO.__DATABASE__________DESCRIPTION_____________________
|
|   1   WorldCat          Books and other materials in libraries worldwide.
|   2   Article1st        Index of articles from nearly 12,500 journals.
|   3   Contents1st       Table of contents of nearly 12,500 journals.
|   4   FastDoc           Index of articles with text online or by email.
|   5   NetFirst          OCLC database of Internet resources.
|   6   AIDS/Cancer       An index to AIDS and cancer research.
| * 7   CINAHL            Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health.
| * 8   MDX Health        Digest of medical and health information.
| * 9   MEDLINE           Abstracted articles from medical journals.
|  10   PsycFIRST         Psychology abstracts from over 1300 journals.
The general procedure: if you can find one article that seems to be the sort of thing you're looking for, the information contained in its record can probably lead you to others which are similar.
So start with a keyword search (in FirstSearch, su: is 'keyword'), then look through the results to find some that look like the right sort of thing, and look at the end of those records to identify the identifiers, descriptors, major headings (each database handles these slightly differently. Most use de: for descriptors, but MEDLINE uses mh: for its Medical Subject Headings.
Here are links to the details for the several most likely FirstSearch databases: