BIO 144: ST: Science/Technology
Here are some starting places to research issues in bioethics and biomedicine. Feel free to ask a librarian for help if you're not finding what you need.
Reference books for background
Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics. 4 vols. San Diego, CA: Academic, 1998. (Ref BJ 63 .E44 1998) Offers excellent overviews of ways in which a wide variety of issues can be analyzed from an ethical standpoint. Includes articles on such topics as abortoin, euthenasia, fetal research, and other bioethics topics.
Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Rev. ed. 5 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1995. (Ref QH 332 .E52 1995) Covers issues and controversies in bioethics in lengthy, scholarly articles, each one accompanied by a current bibliography of key sources. Though dated, these essays do a good job of outlining key ethical concepts.
CQ Researcher. Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1991 - (Ref H 35 .E352) A good place to find coverage of controversial current events, including some related to science and technology. Each weekly update focuses on a topic of general interest and provides an overview, various viewpoints, statistics, and a bibliography for further research. Indexes make it easy to locate the most recent coverage of a given topic. Before 1991, this series was titled Editorial Research Reports.
MnPALS - our catalog. Includes books, videos, government documents, and more.
MnLINK - a catalog of Minnesota libraries. Use the "request" button and your barcode number and last name for username and password to borrow books through interlibrary loan.
For articles that are not linked to full text, see if the journal title is listed in our journal locator.
Academic Search premier - an interdisciplinary database of magazines and journals in all disciplines; you can limit a search to scholarly articles.
LexisNexis - especially good for full-text newspaper stories from around the world. Good for recent news in non-technical language
PubMed - the world's biggest database of medical research; includes some articles on bioethics issues, though for the most part it covers research findings. Also called Medline.
Journals of particular interest:
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - vol. 70 (1996) to present online
Hastings Center Report - in print downstairs and online.
Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved - just started publishing in 2004; 3 issues are online.
Literature and Medicine - vol. 14 (1995) to present online.
Perspecitives in Biology and Medicine - vol. 43 (1990) to present
The Web is particularly good for government-sponsored reports, hearings, etc. It also is a place to find organizations that take a stand on a bioethics issue. Always consider the political or editorial stance of an oragnization if you use their information or data.
Bioethics Research on the Web - a selected directory of sites from the National Library of Medicine
BioethicsWeb - a gateway to bioethics Web sites from the UK-based Wellcome Trust, a non-profit medical research organization.
Ethics Update - a guide to Web-based articles and other materials on ethics issues, some of them bioethics. Less scholarly than articles published in journals.
National Institutes of Health - the federal research agency that funds most basic research in the medical sciences in the US. An enormous amount of data is available here. Includes the National Library of Medicine, which has an interesting online digital exhibit on anatomy and the artistic imagination, Dream Anatomy.
President's Council on Bioethics - an advisory council for the Bush administration on bioethics issues. For a contrarian view try a Democratic critique of the current administration's approach to science issues, Politics and Science.
Scirus - a limited search engine for science articles and web sites. Most of the articles listed here are not available in full text on the Web, but some are.
Barbara Fister 10/04