Peer-reviewed biology papers online?

[Pythagorean]

It's one click in Scholar to look at recent papers. A click and some keyboard taps to specify a date range.

Highly cited is good though. Ideally, you want something about 2-3 years old but heavily cited. This is very easy to do with Google Scholar, since you can see all its citing papers and do a search only within it's citing papers. If you look at something just published yesterday and you're an undergrad, you don't get to see the critiques of it. But if you look at something with a couple years between now and then, you can see what other people said.

As an example: An unknowing undergrad could pull up a peer-reviewed paper on the quantum brain that was published yesterday, and thus had no citations. Story over, he cites it in his paper because he wasn't familiar with the field. It would be more helpful to see one published a couple years ago and then be able to see all the citing papers so he can see how heavily the paper is criticized and rebuked. The buck doesn't stop at peer-reviewed. That's what's great about Google Scholar's "cited by" function.

Of course, you could use Web of Knowledge too, but there have been cases with my adviser where I demonstrated Google Scholar showed more (valid) "cited by" sources than Web of Knowledge did. In one case, Web of Knowledge showed 1 citing article and GS showed 100+ (ok, I only checked the first five... but they were all peer-reviewed journals that cited the article in question).

 

[Evo]

I was just going to edit my last post to say, if it wasn't evident, that I agreed with you on checking multiple sources, for those that can sort the wheat from the chaff, as I know you can. But you've already responded.

Again, I am just thinking of the OP, and his/her specific needs, I don't know how familiar they are with scientific journals, if they know about how to check for journals http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/, and even that list contains journals we don't accept and it has even added pop-science magazines!

I'm reminded of an assignment I had in my freshman year in college (before the internet) and a not too bright student in my class was leaving the library, I assumed he'd given up, I figured I would ask if I could help him look for things and he said "nope, I'm finished". Of course I didn't believe him, but looking at what he had, he certainly had enough references. I asked him how he managed so quickly, he said that the librarian had noticed he was lost and asked him what he was looking for, and she went off and got him everything, he did nothing.

Moral of the story, librarians are a tremendous, often overlooked resource. I could've kicked myself for not using the most precious asset I had available to me. Now with the internet, they are maybe even more helpful. Don't forget to use the librarian to assist you in your searches.

 

[Monique]

how do you get bibtex out of pubmed?

You can "send to" and there different options.

also, how do you do 1)?

PubMed shows multiple sources for papers, like here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23874428 In a search one can filter for free full text. I'm sure that feature was included for developing countries that don't have the resources to subscribe to journals.

Highly cited is good though. Ideally, you want something about 2-3 years old but heavily cited. This is very easy to do with Google Scholar, since you can see all its citing papers and do a search only within it's citing papers. If you look at something just published yesterday and you're an undergrad, you don't get to see the critiques of it. But if you look at something with a couple years between now and then, you can see what other people said.

An undergrad should learn that one has to judge an article on its content, when one cites it. It is not sufficient to rely on the impact factor of a journal, or the number of citations, or a citation in another publication.

The student should read a paper and judge whether it's an appropriate citation. Having thought about it, I am against listing the number of citations in PubMed. It does no justice to emerging research. Impact factor of journals is also not listed in PubMed, exactly because it prejudices people to only cite certain studies, it's the content of the article that should count.

 

[Pythagorean]

You can "send to" and there different options.

none of which are bibtex, though.

PubMed shows multiple sources for papers, like here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23874428 In a search one can filter for free full text. I'm sure that feature was included for developing countries that don't have the resources to subscribe to journals.

Here's an example where pubmed only lists one restricted version:

"To read this article in full you may need to log in, make a payment or gain access through a site license (see right)."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=(Krahe[Author]) AND Burst firing in sensory systems

whereas Scholar gives several versions (14 in fact!), including free manuscripts:

http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?cluster=10932066625886224407&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

This has also been useful for me when authors have several different versions with different scales of content for the same named paper.

An undergrad should learn that one has to judge an article on its content, when one cites it. It is not sufficient to rely on the impact factor of a journal, or the number of citations, or a citation in another publication..

There's nothing in Scholar's terms and agreements that prevents you from reading the article and judging for yourself. If you want to speculate about how it affects perceptions, that's fine, but it's not a very solid argument for completely eschewing Scholar.

 

[Monique]

Here's an example where pubmed only lists one restricted version:

"To read this article in full you may need to log in, make a payment or gain access through a site license (see right)."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=(Krahe[Author]) AND Burst firing in sensory systems

whereas Scholar gives several versions (14 in fact!), including free manuscripts:

http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?cluster=10932066625886224407&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

This has also been useful for me when authors have several different versions with different scales of content for the same named paper.

The versions scholar finds are illegal, one can't blame PubMed for not indexing illegal content.

Then there should only be one published version. What a mess when people are using in-between-versions for their work! A new version is made for a reason, for instance to correct mistakes.