NMBL Search

Taxonomic and Biodiversity Databases

AlgaeBase Literature provides information on algae that includes terrestrial, marine and freshwater organisms. At present, the data for the marine algae, particularly seaweeds, are the most complete.

Encyclopedia of Life (EoL) provides information and pictures of all species known to science with the aim to increase awareness and understanding of living nature through an Encyclopedia of Life that gathers, generates, and shares knowledge in an open, freely accessible and trusted digital resource.

FishBase is a relational database collating fish information for research scientists, fisheries managers, and zoologists offering a wide range of information on all fish species currently known in the world: taxonomy, biology, trophic ecology, life history, and uses, as well as historical data reaching back to 250 years.

Hexacorallians of the World is a compilation of publications concerning taxonomy, nomenclature, and geographic distribution of extant hexacorallians.

Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) is a global open-access data and information clearing-house on marine biodiversity of living species in the ocean.

Marine Life Information Network (MarLIN) provides information on the biology of species and the ecology of habitats found around the coasts and seas of the British Isles.

World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) provides an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine organisms, including information on synonymy.

Review publications

Advances in Marine Biology (available electronically via ScienceDirect or in print from 1963 onwards with shelfmark SE.I/Gb.15)
First published in 1963 under the founding editorship of Sir Frederick S. Russell, FRS, the serial publishes in-depth and up-to-date reviews on a wide range of topics which will appeal to postgraduates and researchers in marine biology, fisheries science, ecology, zoology and biological oceanography. Eclectic volumes in the series are supplemented by thematic volumes.

Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review (available in print from 1963 onwards with shelfmark SE.i:Gb.12)
Provides a yearly review covering the basics of marine research, special topics, and emerging areas. It features contributors who are actively engaged in biological, chemical, geological, and physical aspects of marine science.

Literature repositories

Aquatic Commons is a thematic digital repository covering the natural marine, estuarine/brackish and fresh-water environments. The repository contains a growing collection of published and unpublished research, organizational publications, and other scholarly materials contributed by researchers, librarians and their institutions.

Biodiversity Heritage Library provides full text books digitised from ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom offering over two million volumes of biodiversity literature collected over 200 years to support the work of scientists, researchers, and students in their home institutions and throughout the world. It is especially useful for full-text of articles going back as far as 1480 that are out of copyright.

bioRxiv is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides access to full-text, peer-reviewed scholarly articles from around the world.

PlyMSEA is the shared, open access repository for research output from the following three organisations based in Plymouth: The Marine Biological Association (MBA), Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) and the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS).

Woods Hole Scientific Community Open Access Server (WHOAS) is the institutional repository of the Woods Hole scientific community redistributing the intellectual output in digital form.

Bibliographic Databases and Widgets

First point of call

Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts covers the marine, brackish & freshwater environments indexing grey literature alongside mainstream publications (1960 to the present). Detailed indexing allows advanced search specificity.

Web of Science Citation Databases (WoS) indexes articles from highly respected journals (1900 to the present). Also recommended as a resource for interdisciplinary topics.

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Agricola indexes articles, books and technical reports (including material related to aquaculture) from the US National Library of Agriculture.

Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Science is part of the Web of Knowledge database. It indexes the published literature of the most significant conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia workshops and conventions in a wide range of disciplines in science and technology.

Dimensions.ai established in early 2018 a new bibliographic search tool with link to full texts, open access versions where available, citations and altmetric scores.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides access to full-text, peer-reviewed scholarly articles from around the world. To search for articles on a topic, click on Find Articles on left side of DOAJ screen.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) This database allows you to identify the scholarly journals which are the most prominent in a specific area of research. It can serve to familiarize you with many of the journal titles available in marine biology.

OAIster is an online combined bibliographic catalogue of open access material gathered from international digital libraries, institutional repositories, and online journals using the self-service WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. Full-text access to theses, journal articles, conference proceedings, and many other resources that are freely available from electronic collections around the world.

Pub Med provides access to a database of bibliographic information drawn primarily from MEDLINE and PREMEDLINE. MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, dentistry, nursing, veterinary medicine, the health care system and the preclinical sciences. The MEDLINE file contains bibliographic citations and author abstracts from approximately 3,900 current biomedical journals with about 9 million records dating back to 1966.

ScienceDirect is Elsevier’s journal portal. It provides subscription based full-text scientific and medical research journal articles and e-books back to 1995, and indexes pre-1995 articles back to the first issue of each journal.

Unpaywall is a widget and allows you to find open access copies of articles from repositories. Once the widget is installed a clickable green icon will appear when you come across a paywalled article. Clicking on it will link to a legal, free version of the paper.  

Web of Science Citation Databases indexes articles from highly respected journals (1900 to the present). Also recommended as a resource for interdisciplinary topics. Subscription based.

Zetoc Search searching the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents, including over 28,500 journals and more than 52 million article citations and conference papers. Also provides Zetoc Alert, a current awareness service that sends you email alerts matching the search criteria that you have provided whenever new data is loaded into the database.

Specific Bibliographic Databases

Bibliographia Nudibranchia compliled by Gary R McDonald in 2006.

Bibliography of Opisthobranchia compiled by Steven J. Long covering references from 1554-2000.

The Archie Carr Center for Turtle Research (Sea Turtle Online Bibliography 1965- ) indexes more than 11,000 items covering all aspects of sea turtle biology, conservation, and management.

FishBase is a relational database collating fish information for research scientists, fisheries managers, and zoologists offering a wide range of information on all fish species currently known in the world: taxonomy, biology, trophic ecology, life history, and uses, as well as historical data reaching back to 250 years.

FossilWorks provides query, download, and analysis tools that utilize the Paleobiology Database's large relational database assembled by hundreds of paleontologists from around the world.

National Sea Grant Depository (NSGD) serves as an archive of all Sea Grant-funded documents and includes journal articles, conference proceedings, technical reports, brochures, fact sheets, books, maps, newsletters and audio-visual materials.

National Technical Reports Library (NTRL) is one of the world's largest repositories of results from research sponsored by the U.S. Government. Users must register and create an ID to use the basic search box. 

Theses

DART EUROPE E-Thesis Online provides access to open access research theses from 610 Universities in 28 European countries

EThOS is the UK’s national thesis service which aims to maximise the visibility and availability of the UK’s doctoral research theses currently holding 450,000 doctoral theses to download instantly or to order a scanned copy.

Data Resources

British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) is a national facility, funded and maintained by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), to process, archive and distribute data concerning the marine environment.

The Archive for Marine Species and Habitats Data (DASSH) provides tools and services for the long-term curation, management and publication of marine species and habitats data, within the UK and internationally.

US Department of Energy Data Explorer is a search tool for finding publicly available, scientific data funded by the US Department of Energy, covering science, technology, engineering research and data collections.

Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of datatypes.

The European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) consists of more than 160 organisations assembling marine data, products and metadata to make these fragmented resources more available to public and private users free of restrictions on use.

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) provides a comprehensive record of the world's nucleotide sequencing information, covering raw sequencing data, sequence assembly information and functional annotation.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international open data infrastructure allowing anyone, anywhere to access data about all types of life on Earth, shared across national boundaries via the Internet.

GenBank is the US National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) genetic sequence database, an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences.

Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) is an international repository intended to facilitate ecological and environmental research to share, discover, access, and interpret complex ecological data.

The Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) is a partnership of UK organisations committed to improving access to marine data. It provides support mechanism for submitting data, metadata and for finding marine data.

National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a North American-scale observation system for examining ecological change over time.

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is a national repository and dissemination facility for global oceanographic data which acquires and preserves a historical record of the Earth's changing environment. It includes atmospheric, coastal, oceanic, and geophysical data.

Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) is a global open-access data and information clearing-house on marine biodiversity of living species in the ocean.

The Biological Traits Information Catalogue (BIOTIC) provides scientists working within the field of benthic community ecology with an additional tool for their data analyses. Biological traits information of benthic species contained in the BIOTIC database can be downloaded and linked to benthic survey data. This may allow benthic data to be analysed not only on a taxonomic level but also on a functional level.