Archaeology & Palaeoecology: Bibliographic databases

Before you start searching the databases, you will need to construct a search strategy: 

• Break your search topic into key concepts
• For each concept, think of keywords and synonyms
• Connect similar keywords using the OR command
• Combine different concepts using the AND command 
• Use brackets to group OR terms together
• Use database search features such as phrase searching and truncation, where appropriate 

See Planning your search strategy for more information

The key bibliographic databases relevant to Archaeology and Palaeoecology are listed below. 

• Web of Science Core Collection - Access to citation databases, journals and conference proceedings with current and retrospective coverage in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Includes Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Conference Proceedings Citation Index and Emerging Sources Citation Index. 

• Scopus - SCOPUS is the world's largest bibliographic and citation database. It covers nearly 20,000 academic journals from a wide range of subjects and dates from 1996 to the present. SCOPUS will also be the source of the citation data which will be used by some of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment panels. As well as carrying out literature searches, you can set up current awareness alerts, view citation counts, determine your h-index and assess the quality of journal titles. SCOPUS is part of the SciVerse suite of resources which is produced by Elsevier and includes the ScienceDirect electronic journals service. 

• JSTOR Ireland - An interdisciplinary collection of materials from and about Ireland. When complete, the Ireland Collection will contain a minimum of 75 journals, including journals with moving walls between 1 and 5 years and ceased journals from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Over 200 monographs and 2,500 manuscript pages will also be included. 

• JSTOR Arts & Sciences - JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that enables discovery, access, and preservation of scholarly content. It enables access to a full-text journals. 

• Project Muse - Full-text online access to over 300 humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers. Check 'detailed holdings' for journal availability. 

• Historical Abstracts - Historical Abstracts is an exceptional resource that covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more - essential for libraries supporting upper-division and graduate research. This authoritative database provides indexing of more than 2,300 academic historical journals in over 40 languages back to 1955. History and social science researchers have used Historical Abstracts to discover significant and groundbreaking work for more than 50 years. 

• International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) - This database includes over two million bibliographic references to journal articles and to books, reviews and selected chapters dating back to 1951. It is unique in its broad coverage of international material and incorporates over 100 languages and countries. Over 2,800 journals are regularly indexed and some 7,000 books are included each year.

• Archaeology Data Service (ADS) Library - The ADS Library brings together bibliographic records and e-prints for published and unpublished archaeological documents.

You can set up email alerts within bibliographic databases to find out what new articles are being published in your area of interest; check out the Help screens in each database for instructions of how to do this. 

If you find a relevant article, an easy way to find other articles on the same topic is to look at the Reference list/Bibliography. Most databases also have a Citation search feature which means you can link to other articles that have referred to your original paper.