Library Guides: Plant Identification and Foraging: Home

In This Guide

This guide aims to provide resources to aid education on plant sciences, plant identification, and plant foraging. You will find resources in many formats: websites, articles, databases, blogs, eBooks, print books, and social medias. This page focuses on general plant sciences resources.

Please note that some resources, such as databases and eBooks, may be limited to current MU affiliates due to licensing restrictions. These can be identified by the MU icon next to the name.

Historical Plant Science Research

If you are interested in finding historical information about the study of plant sciences, a specific species, or a specific botanist, these websites will provide useful information.

Botanicus
Botanicus is a freely accessible portal to historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library.
Tropicos
The Tropicos database links over 1.33M scientific names with over 4.87M specimens and over 685K digital images (both modern and historical). The data includes over 150K references from over 52.6K publications offered as a free service to the world’s scientific community.
Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity works to digitalize natural history literature. It provides free access to hundreds of thousands of volumes, comprising over 58 million pages, from the 15th-21st centuries.
Encyclopedia of Life
Growing collection of information on the world's 1.8 million known species. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the categories of Plants, Flowering Plants, and Trees.

Botany eBooks

Botany: An Introduction to Plant Biology
The Sixth Edition of Botany: An Introduction to Plant Biology provides a modern and comprehensive overview of the fundamentals of botany while retaining the important focus of natural selection, analysis of botanical phenomena, and diversity.
Plants of the World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Vascular Plants
Plants of the World is the first book to systematically explore every vascular plant family on earth—more than four hundred and fifty of them—organized in a modern phylogenetic order. Detailed entries for each family include descriptions, distribution, evolutionary relationships, and fascinating information on economic uses of plants and etymology of their names.
Botany for Dummies
Botany For Dummies gives you a thorough, easy-to-follow overview of the fundamentals of botany, helping you to improve your grades, supplement your learning, or review before a test. Covers evolution by natural selection. Offers plain-English explanations of the structure and function of plants Includes plant identification and botanical phenomenon.

Plant Science Databases

National Agriculture Library - SEARCH
SEARCH is the NAL's main search tool to provide access to more than 8 million USDA records from AGRICOLA, PubAg, and the NAL Digital Collections (NALDC).

AGRICOLA
A database produced by the U.S. National Agricultural Library that provides access to worldwide periodical literature and USDA publications. Subject coverage includes plant and animal sciences, food and nutrition, agriculture, biotechnology, entomology, forestry, and wildlife.
Date Coverage: 1970-present

Maximum Users: Unlimited

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User's Guide: https://support.ebsco.com/help/Agricola
Scopus
Database with abstracts and citations of research literature and quality web sources, including journals, conference proceedings, trade publications, abstracts, and patent records. A multidisciplinary resource covering materials from the humanities, sciences and social sciences. Also indexes EMBASE and allows you to locate the most highly cited items and the articles that cite them.
Date Coverage: 1970-present; selected access back to 1823

Maximum Users: Unlimited

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Search Guide: http://help.scopus.com

Tutorial: https://supporthub.scopus.com

Auto Alerts: http://library.missouri.edu/search/databases/alertslist.htm#scopus
Academic Search Premier
This multi-disciplinary database provides full text for more than an abundance of journals and covers extensive academic disciplines and provides comprehensive content, including PDF back-files, videos, and searchable cited references.
Contains 4,600 journals, including full text for nearly 3,900 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.

Date Coverage:Varies; primarily 1970s-present with some titles covering earlier dates

Maximum Users: Unlimited

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Auto Alerts: http://libraryguides.missouri.edu/alerts/ebsco
Web of Science Core Collection
Web of Science indexes thousands of scholarly journals, books, reports, conferences and more. Citation information and analysis with cited reference searching available. The collection includes Science Citation Index Expanded (1990-present), Social Sciences Citation Index Expanded (1990-present), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1990-present), Conference Proceedings Citation Index (1990-present), Book Citation Index (2005-present), Current Chemical Reactions (1985-present) and Index Chemicus (1993-present).
Date Coverage: Varies by Web of Science collection
Maximum Users: Unlimited
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BIOSIS Citation Index
Contains journals, reports, books, meetings, and U.S. patents in all disciplines of the life sciences, including traditional areas of biology, such as botany, zoology, and microbiology, as well as related fields such as plant and animal science, agriculture, pharmacology, and ecology.
Date Coverage: 1969-2014
Maximum Users: Unlimited
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Plant Libraries Directory
View the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries' directory of plant libraries to find a library near you.