Biosciences and Chemistry

Professional bodies and societies are such useful sources of information.

You can find out what is key to your professional body by looking at the organisations website. They tend to be full of information about research, events and news that matter to the organisation.

This box contains links to professional bodies, associations, societies and trusts related to the sciences. There are no descriptions with the links as the organisation name explains the remit or interest of the organisation:

For some assignments you need to know more about clinical trials.

Clinical trials are incredibly vital to research but what is a clinical trial?  You can find the answer using the following links!

How can I find clinical trials?

You have options! You can either search for a study on a clinical trial / research study website or you can use a database like PubMed and use the clinical trial filter or limit.

How do I find the results?

The volume of information available may relate to the stage of the trial, whether the team has published results or associated information. To find out more, you should head back to the site you used to locate the trial and see if there are study results, associated publications or you can run an author search in a database for the principal / lead investigator.

How and why are clinical trials registered?

You can find out more about this from a UK, US and international perspective below:

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a public body sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

Explore the Research Councils websites for information on funding (UK and international) and grants, studentships and much more.

Be responsible and ethical!

You can find out more about research ethics by looking at the following links and organisations:

This box contains links to research organisations working within the sciences.

There will be other organisations in other areas. You can find out more by using any popular search engine.

What is a pre-print?

Preprints are versions of articles which are made available before they are peer-reviewed and published. Preprints are not peer-reviewed, edited, or typeset before being posted online. 

Reading a pre-print can be a way to access to information before it becomes available in academic journals. You still have to evaluate the content as it is very likely that the material has not yet been peer reviewed.

Preprints are usually made available on a preprint server by the author(s).  Preprint servers are often dedicated to articles in a specific discipline or group of disciplines. Some publishers post preprints as part of their publication processes either to an existing preprint server or to a publisher owned platform. Not all preprints go on to be published in a peer reviewed journal or other venue.

What is open access?

Open Access is about making research publications freely available, enabling the results to be read and built on by anyone. An Open Access repository is a searchable archive of full text content.

Charities can be great sources of information.

Explore the research or news section of charity websites related to your subject area. There are no descriptions with the links as the organisation name explains the remit or interest of the organisation.

There will be charities in other areas. You can find out more by using any popular search engine.