BeeSpace Information Sources

 

 

 

Bibliographic Databases:

 

These are comprehensive sources for scientific literature.  Note they cover the broad subject, so that Medline only covers the medically related articles not every article even from the most influential journals.  Typically, each record contains the abstract of a journal article, plus bibliographic metadata such as title/author and subject descriptors.

 

The UIUC University Library subscribes to a wide variety of bibliographic databases:

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr/results.php?types=A&tstype=S&titlesearch=

There is a virtual Biotechnology Library relevant to genomic sources:

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/biotech/  

 

Traditionally, the bibliographic databases have a subject thesaurus where human indexers classify the subjects for each abstract, e.g. MeSH for Medline.  The largest databases are abandoning subject classification for phrase tagging, e.g Biosis identifies the type of key phrases within the internal text of the abstract rather than external subject descriptors. 

The honey bee literature is spread across multiple disciplines and databases.

 

Medline (Medicine, National Library of Medicine)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi

 

 

The Silver Platter service will let several databases be searched, including:

http://web5s.silverplatter.com/webspirs/start.ws?customer=c2926&databases=BX

 

Biosis (Biology, Biological Abstracts)

 

Agricola (Agriculture, US National Library of Agriculture)

CAB Abstracts (UK Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau)

Agris (FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)

 

 

Apicultural Abstracts (International Bee Research Association)

http://www.ibra.org.uk/

see database dump of CDs at http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/~schatz/databases

 

 

Government Publications (mostly federal US)

http://www.science.gov/

 

 

Natural History Books:

 

For honey bee, there is the unusual situation of a thousand years of human observations.  This is due to the economic importance of beekeeping for honey and wax.  The fulltext in beekeeping and other natural history books is a rich source of functional information.

 

The Hive and the Honeybee (Mann Biology Library at Cornell University)

http://bees.library.cornell.edu/

 

Plant Facts (Extension Publications maintained at Ohio State University)

http://hcs.osu.edu/plantfacts/web/

National Extension (maintained by American Distance Education Consortium)

http://www.e-answersonline.org/

 

Scientific Bee Books from Harvard University Press (Amazon Look Inside samples)

Mark Winston, The Biology of the Honey Bee

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0674074092/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-9340273-5081608#reader-link 

Tom Seeley, The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0674953762/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-9340273-5081608#reader-link

 

 

 

Database Samples:

 

Here are some manageable samples to be used for text processing experiments.  All are contained in http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/~schatz/databases  . They are downloaded from Biological Abstracts (Biosis) so have relational (type) tags for key text phrases.

 

http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/~schatz/databases/apis-mellifera.biosis-1998.txt

1200 records about apis mellifera (honey bee)

 

http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/~schatz/databases/honeybee.biosis-1980.txt

6500 records about bees

 

http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/~schatz/databases/drosophila-gene.txt  

3600 records about drosophila (fruit fly) genes