Find information to help search for alternatives (aka the "3Rs" - on right of this page) mandated by the Animal Welfare Act and required for IACUC (Breeding, section 6; Research, section 7; Instruction, section 2) protocols.
The librarians listed on the right of this page offer periodic workshops on how to effectively search resources (check the NLI website and look for emails from the IACUC), but you can also use this worksheet as a guide through the literature search process, and the National Agricultural Library's Animal Use Alternatives Thesaurus to generate additional search terms.
Several key databases to use in your searches are listed below. This is not an all-inclusive list, feel free to set up a consultation with one of the librarians on this page to assist with your literature review.
Search across multiple Entrez-hosted databases from the National Library of Medicine. Entrez is NCBI’s primary text search and retrieval system that integrates the PubMed database of biomedical literature with 39 other literature and molecular databases including DNA and protein sequence, structure, gene, genome, genetic variation and gene expression.
CAB Abstracts indexes citations and abstracts from journals, books, reports, handbooks, conference proceedings, field notes, and theses in agriculture, life sciences, natural resources, veterinary sciences, applied economics, nutrition, tourism, and the environment. Includes the CAB Abstracts Archive. Some full text available as PDFs. 1910s-present.
This database indexes citations and abstracts for journal articles, books, conference papers, reference works, and dissertations (in full text PDFs) across multiple agricultural, biological, and natural resource databases on the ProQuest platform. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. Use the Databases link at the top of the screen to change which databases are searched.
AGRICOLA indexes citations for journal articles, books, proceedings, theses, patents, translations, audiovisual materials, computer software, and technical reports pertaining to all aspects of agriculture, life sciences, nutrition, and environmental science. This database provides selective worldwide coverage of primary information sources in agriculture and related fields. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. 1970-present.
REDUCE: minimize how many animals are used.
REFINE: use techniques/procedures that minimize distress and pain to animals.
REPLACE: substitute animal models with non-animal techniques or lower organisms.