LibGuides: Physics: Bibliographic databases

Introduction - what are bibliographic databases?

Bibliographic databases (often just referred to as 'databases') allow you to search across a wide range of journals and this is the best way to find relevant academic information on your topic. The main bibliographic databases relevant to Physics are listed below.

These databases contain references and abstracts and will link you to the full text of the article where QUB has a subscription to the e-journal.

Constructing a search strategy

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

For a more detailed description of search techniques, please see separate page on Planning your search strategy.

Bibliographic databases relevant to Physics

Some of the key bibliographic databases relevant to Physics 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 - 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.
IEEE Xplore Full-text access to the journals and conference proceedings of both the IET and the IEEE as well as to IEEE standards. Coverage is from 1988 to the present although selected content dating back to 1950 is also included.
arXiv - arXiv is an Open Access scholarly publishing platform which contains pre-peer reviewed author manuscripts, prior to being published in academic journals. It includes over 1 million e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.

INSPIRE INSPIRE is an Open Access trusted community hub that helps researchers to share and find accurate scholarly information in high energy physics.

Astrophysics Data System (ADS) The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a digital library portal for researchers in astronomy and physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic collections containing more than 15 million records covering publications in astronomy and astrophysics, physics, and general science, including all arXiv e-prints.

Top Tip - Reference lists and Citation searching

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.

Keeping up to date

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.