Guides: Subject Guide: Physics: Subject Databases

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Faculty Librarian - Science

Colin Theakston

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Resources

About our Databases

FirstSearch
Provides online access to an extensive collection of general and specialized databases covering a wide range of subject areas. Features links to abstracts, articles, indexes, reviews, and full text of works such as dissertations, journals, reports, and conference proceedings and papers. Links to some OCLC databases.
JSTOR
Provides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, demography, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Consult the online tables of contents for holdings, as coverage varies for each title.
Royal Society publishing
The complete Royal Society journals archive is now available online. This contains thousands of significant scientific papers published since 1665.
Scopus
A large abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Scopus has journal coverage in many subjects across the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities.
SPIRES HEP literature database
Provides searching of more than 500,000 high-energy physics (HEP) related articles, including journal papers, preprints, e-prints, technical reports, conference papers and theses. Comprehensively indexed by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Deutsche Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) libraries since 1974.
Web of Science
ISI Web of Science is an integrated platform designed to support research in academic, corporate, government, and not for profit organizations. ISI citation databases are multidisciplinary databases of bibliographic information indexed to be searched by subject, author, journal, and/or author address. They can also be searched for articles that cite a known author or work. Cited reference searching allows use of a given work as if it were a subject term, to identify more recent articles on the same topic.

arXiv.org e-Print archive
An e-print service which presents papers in physics and related disciplines, mathematics, nonlinear science, computer science, and quantitative biology. ArXiv.org is a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers which functions as a means of communicating ongoing research information in these subject areas.
IoP electronic journals
Provides access to all tables of contents and to abstracts and full article text in Acrobat, PDF or PostScript formats for all Institute of Physics electronic journals. Now includes access to the Institute of Physics electronic journal archive covering IOP journals between 1874 and 1998.
The NASA astrophysics data system
The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a NASA-funded project which maintains four bibliographic databases containing more than 4.1 million records: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Physics and Geophysics, and Los Alamos preprint server. The main body of data in the ADS consists of bibliographic records, which are searchable through the Abstract Service query forms, and full-text scans of much of the astronomical literature which can be browsed though the Browse interface. Included in the abstracts are links to scanned images of journal articles from major astronomical journals. In addition, the ADS provides access or pointers to astronomical data catalogs and data archives from NASA.

Patents

Patents are an important source of information, much of the material is never published in any other format. There are a number of free resources available via the Internet but for a comprehensive search reference should be made to the Intellectual Proprty Office. The Patent Office site gives information about patents as well as about making patent applications.

Sources of information for patents include: