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.

• DISCOVER searches many databases as well as the library catalogue.

• IEEE/IET Electronic Library our biggest database for Computing, gives access to over 150 journals and 900 conference proceedings. Includes useful online tutorials with search tips.

• ACM Digital Library full text journals, conference proceedings etc. from the ACM. Can also retrieve abstracts only of many more publications by selecting 'The ACM Guide to Computing Literature'.

• ScienceDirect  Collection of full text of journals published by Elsevier.

• DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)  free, quality, full-text ejournals. Computing is in the Technology and Engineering section.

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 .

• ISI Web of Knowledge  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. ZETOC  searches the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC).

• Google Scholar can function as a bibliographic database if used with care. It searches a huge range of sources across many subject areas. Beware that it may miss results that a specialist academic database, like IEEE, will find and that you won't be able to access all of your hits. You should therefore not rely solely on it.