Bioinformatics: Book Search

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Why Books?

Books are useful for:

in depth information,
historical context,
overview, synthesis and analysis.

Check the table of contents: often a chapter or two are all that is needed.

NCBI E-Book Collection

Samples from this collection include: The NCBI C++ Toolkit, The NCBI Handbook covering topics such as how data are included in a database, database design, query processing, and how the different resources relate to each other; and NCBI Short Courses about the eUtilities.

NCBI Bookshelf
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) offers searchable full text biomedical books. Books are divided into content units, usually chapters, and are linked to PubMed abstracts. Browsing and printing options vary according to publisher permissions. There are > 80 titles.

MARQCAT Search

Tools: Advanced Search

Evaluating Books

The quality and relevance of information in books needs to be evaluated. What to look for:

Authority of the authors, editors - Determine the expertise of the authors, does it match the subject content of their writing?

Scope of Content - Does the content cover your topic to the degree you need? Is it in-depth or does it simply provide an overview with little facts, details, analysis?

Timeliness - Is the content timely for your topic. This is determined somewhat by the time period of your topic.

For help finding book reviews see this research guide:
Book Reviews

Safari Books Online

O'Reilly from Proquest This link opens in a new window
Click on "Institution Not Listed"; ignore the drop down menu. Use your Marquette email address for access. Personal accounts can be created for additional functionality.
Ebook library of current technology, digital media, and business books and videos online. Topics include: IT management, e-commerce/business, programming languages, graphics, hardware, multimedia, security and many others.

Synthesis Lecture series

These "lectures" are short books providing an overview of a topic, written by a subject expert. Click on an area below to see individual titles in that series.

Data Management
"The scope will largely follow the purview of premier information and computer science conferences, such as ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, PODS, ICDT, and ACM KDD. Potential topics include, but not are limited to: query languages, database system architectures, transaction management, data warehousing, XML and databases, data stream systems, wide scale data
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
"The series publishes 50- to 150-page publications on topics pertaining to data mining, web mining, text mining, and knowledge discovery, including tutorials and case studies. The scope will largely follow the purview of premier computer science conferences, such as KDD."