Botany Research Guide  

This guide provides a set of resources for advanced undergraduate research in Botany at Cabot Science Library. This list is not intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive. Cabot Library holds the general science collections for the university; additional resources are available at the Botany Libraries, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Library. Please consult the HOLLIS catalog and the E-Research @ Harvard site for all of Harvard’s holdings.

Image courtesy Royal Botanic Gardens

Please contact us if you need help with your research!

AGRICOLA 
It describes books, book chapters, journal articles, audiovisuals, publications and resources encompassing all aspects of agriculture and allied disciplines, from the 16th century to the present.

CAB Abstracts 
The CAB Abstracts database indexes research and development literature in agriculture, forestry, human and animal nutrition, animal health, natural resource management and conservation, and related aspects of human health. Focal areas are animal and plant science, crop protection, parasitology, soil science, rural development, economics, horticulture, and agricultural engineering.

Citation Indexes / Web of Science 
Science Citation Index is a multidisciplinary database, with searchable author abstracts, covering the journal literature of the sciences. It indexes 5,700 major journals across more than 150 scientific disciplines. Because the information stored about each article includes the article's cited reference list (often called its bibliography), you can also search this database for articles that cite a known author or work.

See the Digital Resources page of the Botany Libraries for a more comprehensive list of resources.

Many prominent institutions are digitzing their collections of botanical literature. This is a selection of these projects; a more complete list can be found here.

Biodiversity Heritage Library 
A consortium of 12 museums and botanical gardens are digitizing their collections and making them freely available.

Core Historical Literature of Agriculture  
19th and early 20th century literature digitized by Cornell University Library.

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 
Rich source of digitized plant information.

HathiTrust Digital Library 
Millions of digitzed books gathered from major research collections with a good search interface.