Databases for my subject
Full-Text Databases
These are searchable and provide the full text of articles they find; these are extremely useful as well as being easy to use.
- ScienceDirect collection of thousands of academic journals published by Elsevier.
- Wiley Journals collection A comprehensive collection of electronic journals in the Life Sciences.
- Annual Review Journals contain critical reviews written by leading scientists in specific disciplines.
- Springer journals Access to a wide range of full-text academic journals from 1997 onwards.
- Medline with Full-text Contains links to full-text articles available through the Medline database.
- Pubmed Central free version of Medline from the National Library of Medicine contains citations and abstracts to world-wide biomedical literature.
- JSTOR contains articles from journals in biological, health and environmental science.
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides access to a wide range of full text quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.
Bibliographic Databases
Also known as indexes and abstracts, these provide details of huge numbers of journal articles and other publications, but don't provide access to them. Often we have the full text of articles elsewhere, but you have to find it. If the university does not have the journal you require you should be able to obtain it through the Document Supply service
- Web of Science A collection of databases, covering many subject areas.
- Scopus very strong in the Sciences, this contains citations from over 25,000 peer-reviewed publications.
- The British Library's main catalogue searches all UK publications (books, journal articles etc.) and many from abroad.
- The Cochrane Library collection of databases specialising in systematic reviews and meta-analyses of medical research.
- Google Scholar can function as a bibliographic database if used with care. It searches a huge range of sources across many subject areas, but you will find and that you can't access everything on it. You should therefore not rely solely on it.
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