Databases & Indexes

Send comments and questions to Mary Beth Minick, SPEA Subject Librarian

General Topics (a good place to begin your search)

Academic Search Premier
Academic Search Elite contains full text for more than 2,000 serials. More than 100 journals have PDF images back to 1985. The database includes PDF images for the great majority of journals; many of these PDFs are native (searchable) or scanned-in-color. Covers a wide range of academic areas including business, social sciences, humanities, general academic, general science, education and multi-cultural. Dates of coverage vary by publication.

EI Compendex
EI Compendex is the most comprehensive bibliographic database of multidiscipline engineering. It offers international coverage of the literature in engineering and technology. Citations, with abstracts, are in English. If a title is in a language other than English (about 10% of citations), both the original title and the English translation are available. Abstracts from over 5,000 international journals, conferences papers and technical reports are included. Each year, over 220,000 new abstracts are added from 175 disciplines and major specialties.

Expanded Academic ASAP
Expanded Academic ASAP is designed to satisfy the broad needs of students, faculty and graduate researchers. Balanced coverage is available through 3,800 indexed and 2,200 full-text titles in a wide variety of disciplines including: social science journals, humanities journals, science and technology journals, medical journals, national news periodicals, general interest magazines, newswires, and many others. More than 2,500 journals are peer reviewed, and up to 25 years of backfile coverage is included.

 InfoTrac OneFile
Use InfoTrac OneFile to access periodical and news content, as well as indexing from a variety of general and specialized journals – from the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor to refereed academic journals. It includes 5,156 full-text titles (more than 9,200 titles in all), full indexing of some of the world's greatest newspapers, 89 wire services covering worldwide current events, and backfile coverage from 1980 to the present.

Factiva
Be forewarned: Factiva is not the easiest database to use, despite the new Beta version search function. It is, however, on of the few databases to have current access to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Business Week, Newsweek, Barron’s, and D&B company profiles. In all, Factiva boasts a collection of more than 10,000 authoritative sources.

LexisNexis Academic
This full-text database includes newspapers, wire services, transcripts of television and radio broadcasts, medical and health journals, trade journals, accounting literature, company financial reports, law reviews, statutory and case law, and public opinion polls. It is international in scope, and includes newspapers in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and German. Dates of coverage vary depending upon the publication.

CQ Researcher
Founded in 1923 as Editorial Research Reports, CQ Researcher is noted for its in-depth coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, and the economy. Each single-themed, 12,000-word report is researched and written by a seasoned journalist. CQ Researcher provides researchers with an introductory overview; background and chronology on the topic; an assessment of the current situation; tables and maps; pro/con statements from representatives of opposing positions; and bibliographies of key sources. CQ Researcher Online offers access to CQ Researcher reports dating back to 1991. PDF files are available for reports from January 1996; color PDFs are available for reports published after January 2001.

Specific Topics (taking your research to greater depths)

Applied Science and Technology Full Text
This database contains full text of articles from 157 applied science and technology journals plus indexing and abstracting for a broad range of leading trade and industrial publications, professional and technical society journals, specialized subject periodicals, buyers' guides, directories, and conference proceedings.

Biological and Agricultural Index Plus Biological & Agricultural Index Plus offers researchers convenient online access to the core literature of biology and agriculture—much of it from peer-reviewed journals—plus full text. Full text citations also link to PDF page images, featuring graphs, charts, diagrams, photos, and illustrations indispensable to science research. It includes indexing and some abstracting of over 365 periodicals as far back as 1983, more than half of them peer-reviewed, and full text of articles from over 80 journals as far back as 1997.

Geography
Geography, a subset of GEOBASE, covers the international literature in physical and human geography, providing access to information from over 2000 journals, monographs, books, conference proceedings reports, and theses.

GeoRef
The GeoRef database, established by the American Geological Institute (AGI) in 1966, provides access to the geoscience literature of the world. The database contains over 2.6 million references to geoscience journal articles, books, maps, conference papers, reports and theses. It covers the geology of North America from 1693 to the present, and the geology of the rest of the world from 1933 to the present. GeoRef includes references to all publications of the U.S. Geological Survey. Masters' theses and doctoral dissertations from US and Canadian universities are also covered.

PubMed
PubMed is a free search engine offering access to the MEDLINE database of citations and abstracts of biomedical research articles. It is offered by the United States National Library of Medicine as part of the Entrez information retrieval system. The inclusion of an article in PubMed does not endorse that article's contents. MEDLINE covers over 4,800 journals published in the United States and more than 70 other countries primarily from 1966 to the present.

Pollution Abstracts
This database provides fast access to the environmental information necessary to resolve day-to-day problems, ensure ongoing compliance, and handle emergency situations more effectively. Pollution Abstracts combines information on scientific research and government policies in a single resource. Topics of growing concern are extensively covered from the standpoints of atmosphere, emissions, mathematical models, effects on people and animals, and environmental action in response to global pollution issues. To ensure comprehensive coverage, material from conference proceedings and hard-to-find documents has been summarized along with information from primary journals in the field.

Web of Science Web of Science indexes 5,700 major science and engineering journals, 1,700 social science journals, and 1,100 arts and humanities journals. Features include citation searching and links to related articles as well as author, title, and subject searching.