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Life Sciences and Medicine

The University Library offers a small selection of printed books and a bigger collection of electronic material like e-books and e-journals in life sciences and medicine. All printed material as well as electronic resources can be found via the catalogue www.a-z.lu.

Subject-related questions on catalog and database research can be addressed to askalibrarian@uni.lu.

New Acquisitions
Print Resources
Electronic Resources
Links

A selection of new acquisitions

	Biochemistry, cell and molecular biology, and genetics: an integrated textbook Zeynep Gromley, Adam Gromley New York: Thieme 2021
	Biologie cellulaire : exercices et méthodes (3e éd.) Pierre Rigo, Sandra Racano Malakoff : Dunod 2021
	Extracellular matrix omics Ricard-Blum, Sylvie Cham: Springer 2021
	Ökologie, Evolution (2., unveränd. Aufl.) Munk, Katharina Stuttgart: Thieme 2021

Consult the new printed books acquired by the LLC. New e-books are to be researched separately via a-z.lu.

If you have an acquisition suggestion, please send the bibliographic data to askalibrarian@uni.lu.
If you are a member of staff, please use the form that is provided on the library pages of the UL-Intranet (ULI).
You need to log in first, then select “The University” -> “Library” -> “Procedures and Policies” (if you are already logged in, click here).

Organisation

Localisation

The life sciences and medicine book collection is housed at Luxembourg Learning Centre in the second floor. Fragile, old or valuable material is in storage and needs to be ordered via the “Request” button above the location details of an a-z.lu entry.

Classification, Signage

The books are sorted on the shelves according to the subject related Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), so that life sciences material would mainly be found within the classification numbers between 570 and 579 (life sciences) and between 610 and 619 (medicine).

Example for DDC: the call number field in the "Get this at a library"-tab might show something like "573.2 Dud". This is the code printed on the book spine to find it on the shelf. The figures represent the main content of the book – in this case:

          500 =       Natural Sciences
          570 =       Life sciences
          573 =         Physical anthropology
          573.2 =      Evolution and genetics of humankind

The three characters behind the figures are the first letters of the author's name or the book title – this helps to further separate the material shelved under the same call number.

Reference Works

You will find below a selection of reference works on life sciences and medicine which are available in the university libraries:

Bourgeault, Ivy	The SAGE handbook of qualitative methods in health research	Los Angeles : SAGE, 2011
Robert S. Porter et al. (Eds.)	The Merck manual of diagnosis and therapy	Kenilworth: Merck Sharp & Dohme, 2018
Ayers, Susan	Cambridge handbook of psychology, health, and medicine	Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007
Overton, Willis F.	The handbook of life-span development	Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley, 2010
GLAT	Lexique pratique de la santé : français-anglais-allemand-espagnol	Paris : La maison du dictionnaire, 2010
Klein, Alexandre	Les sensations de santé : pour une épistémologie des pratiques corporelles du sujet de santé	Nancy : Presses universitaires de Nancy, 2011
Aiello, Susan E. (Ed.)	The Merck veterinary manual	Kenilworth: Merck & Co, 2016

Printed Journal Collection (and other periodical works)

For life sciences and medicine most of the relevant journals are not offered in print (see list of print journal titles in a-z.lu) but as e-journals (see list of e-journal titles in a-z.lu).

The print-only versions of journals need to be ordered from storage – for more information on how to do this, see Journals.

Organisation

There is a lot of information online that is not freely accessible. The University of Luxembourg Library has subscribed to many databases, e-journals and e-books which are accessible by entering your login credentials in a-z.lu, which are provided after becoming a member of the library.

E-books

E-books are available via a-z.lu – if you want to search only e-book titles, choose "Digital library" in the top row of the search box and set the filter “Type of publication” on “Books” (in the menu on the right). For further information on how to find and access e-books in the LLC, click here.

Further directory on international e-books:

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is an online directory to increase discoverability of Open Access books. The database is included in the a-z.lu search.

E-journals and full text articles

E-journals are available via a-z.lu – if you want to search only e-journal titles, choose "Digital library" in the top row of the search box and set the filter “type of publication” on “Journals” (in the menu on the right). Be aware that you only search the titles of the e-journals and not the articles within them. For searching articles in journals, proceedings etc. set the filter on "Articles".

Further directories on international e-journals:

Ulrichsweb	Ulrichsweb is a serials directory on more than 300,000 periodicals of all types: academic and scholarly journals, e-journals, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and more. Access only within the IP-range of the campus or at the National Library (BNL).
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)	The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. The database is included in the a-z.lu search.
Electronic Journals Library	The Electronic Journals Library is a service of the University Library of Regensburg to facilitate the use of scholarly journals on the internet and offers a unified interface to access full-text articles online from all areas of research. Besides the more than 50,000 journals which are accessible free of charge to anyone, participating libraries provide their users access to the journals they subscribe to.

Catalogues and Other Databases

For searching online databases only, choose "Digital library" in the top row of the search box and set the filter “Type of publication” on “Databases” (in the menu on the right).

Here is a selection of further life sciences databases:

NCBI (including PubMed & PMC)	The US-American National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information via several databases, NCBI including PubMed - with more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books -, and PubMed Central (PMC) - a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC)	Europe PMC is a free information resource for biomedical and health researchers based on PubMed Central (PMC).
Livivo	LIVIVO, the search portal for life sciences offered by the German Central Library of Medicine, includes the services and databases of MEDPILOT (medical information) and GREENPILOT (information on nutrition, environment, and agricultural sciences).
LiSSa (Littérature Scientifique en Santé)	LiSSa (Littérature Scientifique en Santé) is a search engine referencing scientific articles in French in the field of health.
PUBLISSO	PUBLISSO is an open access publishing platform for life sciences that is aimed at all researchers working in the field of life sciences who wish to make their work and research data freely accessible through open access publishing.
Embase	Embase is a biomedical literature database provided by Elsevier.
CINAHL	The "Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature" (CINAHL) includes the top nursing and allied health literature and is seen as the authoritative index of nursing and allied health journals.
Agroforestry Database	World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) staff and partners produce research-based evidence on the subject of agroforestry. This knowledge is captured in electronic and printed formats and distributed via a range of interactive online portals, toolkits, and Open Source computer-modelling software for use in agroforestry research and development.
GetInfo – Fachinformationen für Technik und Naturwissenschaften	GetInfo is a service offered by the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), the largest specialised library for science and technology worldwide. With GetInfo you can search free-of-charge in over 160 million data sets of the TIB's collection, leading specialised databases, publishers' offers, as well as in the collection of the German national libraries for medicine and economics.
DBIS – Biology	Overview of databases on biology in DBIS.
DBIS – Medicine	Overview of databases on medicine in DBIS.
ViFa pharm	Virtual library of pharmacy of the university library of Braunschweig (D).
ViFa vet	Virtual library of Veterinary Medicine and General Parasitology of the library of the TiHo Hannover (D).
ICTRP	The International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) offers information about ongoing and completed clinical trials. The database contains the trial registration data sets made available by data providers around the world.
BHL - Biodiversity Heritage Library	The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.
Tree of Life web project (ToL)	The Tree of Life Web Project is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world to provide information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history.
agriRxiv	agriRxiv is a free, open access source of unpublished preprints across the agricultural sciences hosted and managed by CABI (cabi.org), an international, inter-governmental, not-for-profit organization that provides information and applies scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment.
OBRC	The Online Bioinformatics Resources Collection (OBRC) contains annotations and links for more than 2,000 bioinformatics databases and software tools.
WHO COVID-19: Global literature on coronavirus disease	The WHO COVID-19 Research Database gathers the latest international scientific findings on COVID-19. The global literature cited is updated daily from searches of bibliographic databases, hand searching, and the addition of other expert-referred scientific articles.
GideonOnline	One-stop resource for data on Infectious Diseases for research, education and diagnostics.

Protocols

Current Protocols collection	Wiley's Current Protocols collection includes around 20,000 step-by-step techniques, procedures, and practical overviews that provide researchers with methods to ensure reproducible results in their experiments.
Springer Nature Experiments	Experiments offers protocols and methods from Nature Methods, Nature Protocols and SpringerProtocols.
JOVE	JOVE offers more than 10,000 videos of laboratory methods and science concepts.

Online Reference Books, Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias

The following works on life sciences are available online:

Encyclopedia of Life (eol)	The Encyclopedia of Life gathers, generates, and shares knowledge on living nature in an open, freely accessible digital resource.
FAO Glossary of Biotechnology for Food and Agriculture	The "Glossary of Biotechnology for Food and Agriculture" is a revised, augmented version of the "Glossary of Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering" published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 1999.
Harrison's Internal Medicine	Online version of the 19th edition of the medical handbook “Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine”.
Medical Abbreviations Dictionary	The database contains more than 200.000 abbreviations and acronyms from the areas of medicine, biotechnology, pharmacy, and healthcare.
MedTerms medical dictionary
Roche-Lexikon Medizin	This is the online version of the 5^th edition of the German Roche medical dictionary.
Lexikon der Arzneipflanzen und Drogen	German dictionary on medicinal plant and drugs.
The Global Library of Women's Medicine (GLOWM)	Encyclopedia on women’s medicine.

Statistics

Statista	Statista is one of the world’s largest statistics and market data platforms with access to more than 1 million statistics, forecasts, dossiers, reports and infographics on 80.000 topics from more than 22.500 sources.
World Health Statistics	The annual "World Health Statistics reports" of the World Health Organization (WHO) present the most recent health statistics for the WHO Member States.

Thesauri and classifications

The following thesauri and classifications in life sciences are available online:

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)	MeSH is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus. For an official German translation click here.
Classification of the National Library of Medicine (NLM)	A classification of the US National Library of Medicine for the arrangement of library materials in the field of medicine and related sciences used internationally.
UMLS Metathesaurus	The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus is a large, multi-purpose, and multi-lingual thesaurus that contains millions of biomedical and health related concepts, their synonymous names, and their relationships. It is updated by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) twice a year.
International Classification of Diseases for Oncology, 3rd Edition (ICD-O-3)	The ICD-O-3 is a WHO supported classification principally used in tumour or cancer registries for coding the site (topography) and the histology (morphology) of neoplasms, usually obtained from a pathology report.
Anatomisch-Therapeutisch-Chemische (ATC) Klassifikation	Official classification of pharmaceutical products published by the German institute for medical documentation and information.
AGROVOC	AGROVOC is a controlled vocabulary of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, environment.
Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS)	ITIS offers taxonomic information on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes of North America and the world.
Bartoc	The Basic Register of Thesauri, Ontologies & Classifications (BARTOC) is a database of Knowledge Organization Systems and KOS related registries.

Research projects databases

The following research projects databases on life sciences are available online:

CORDIS	CORDIS is the European Commission's primary public repository and portal to disseminate information on all EU-funded research projects and their results in the broadest sense.
Cochrane Library / Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL)	The Cochrane Library contains reviews, meta-analysis and references of clinical studies since 1948. PArt of it is the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), a concentrated source of reports of randomized and quasi-randomized controlled trials.
Research programmes of the US National Cancer Institute	The National Cancer Institute supports projects in oncology and collects information on them.
Clinical studies of the US National Cancer Institute	The National Cancer Institute offers a portal for studies in oncology.
Clinical studies of CenterWatch	CenterWatch provides clinical trials information for both clinical research professionals and patients.
ClinicalTrials.gov (Clinical studies of the US National Institutes of Health)	ClinicalTrials.gov is a registry and results database of publicly and privately supported clinical studies of human participants conducted around the world.
International Clinical Trials Registry Platform	This search portal of the WHO provides access to a central database containing the trial registration data sets collected from international registries.

Clinical Point-of-care (POC) and Evidence-based medicine (EBM) resources

The following factual databases on life sciences are available online:

ClinicalKey	ClinicalKey streamlines access to evidence-based information to help clinicians to keep up with dynamic clinical knowledge, to quickly confirm diagnosis and treatment information, and to advance critical thinking skills and research. From quick answers at the point of care to leading full-text reference material, it delivers content to support clinicians and those in training.
UpToDate	UpToDate is an evidence-based clinical resource that includes a collection of medical and patient information, access to Lexi-comp drug monographs and drug-to-drug interactions, and a number of medical calculators. It is available online and offline and requires a subscription for full access.
Medscape	Medscape offers medical news and expert perspectives, essential point-of-care drug and disease information, and relevant professional education and CME. Membership is free and gives access to the network of sites and services.
BMJ best practice	BMJ Best Practice is an evidence-based generalist point of care tool, structured around the patient consultation with advice on symptom evaluation, test ordering and treatment approach.
Dynamed	DynaMed’s provides evidence-based content for practicing clinicians at the point of care to improve health outcomes.
GideonOnline	One-stop resource for data on Infectious Diseases for research, education and diagnostics.

Factual databases

The following factual databases on life sciences are available online:

FAOSTAT	Contains the data of the Statistics Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
WHO Statistical Information System (WHOSIS)	Statistics on health provided by the World Health Organization.
Health Nutrition and Population Statistics	HealthStats provides key health, nutrition and population statistics gathered from a variety of international sources.
European Health for All Database HFA-DB	HFA-DB provides a selection of core health statistics covering basic demographics, health status, health determinants and risk factors, and health-care resources, utilization and expenditure in the 53 countries in the WHO European Region.
OECD.Stat Extracts	OECD.Stat includes data and metadata for OECD countries and selected non-member economies.
Who Named It?	A dictionary of medical eponyms.

Patents

For patents the following websites might be useful:

Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC)	The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) system is a bilateral system which has been jointly developed by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It combines the best classification practices of the two offices.
International Patent Classification (IPC)	The International Patent Classification (IPC), established by the Strasbourg Agreement 1971, provides for a hierarchical system of language independent symbols for the classification of patents and utility models according to the different areas of technology to which they pertain.
STN International	STN is a leading information service in the field of research and patent information.
DEPATISnet	The German Patent and Trademark Office provides DEPATISnet (Deutsche Patentinformationssystem) where international patents can be searched.
Espacenet	The European Patent office publishes Espacenet that contains data on more than 100 million patent documents from around the world.
WIPO	Website of the World Intellectual Property Organisation.
Google patents search	Google's offer to search for patents only.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations may differ between or even within a branch of sciences. Journals often define the standard of the publication style within their author guidelines.

PubMed Journal Browser	Abkürzungsverzeichnis für die in PubMed/MEDLINE indexierten Zeitschriften
Medical Abbreviations Dictionary	Die Datenbank enthält über 200.000 Abkürzungen und Akronyme mit kurzen Erklärungen aus den Bereichen Medizin, Biotechnologie, Pharmazie und Gesundheitspflege.
France Terme	France Term is a set of terms of different scientific and technical fields in French.
Web of Science: Journal Title Abbreviations	List of journals and their abbreviations.