Research Guides: Physics: Databases

Helpful Searching Strategies

Identifying Keywords

Before you dive into searching library resources or Google Scholar, consider your research topic or question:

Entering the full question or topic is not the most effective way to search and typically yields many irrelevant results.
Instead, think about keywords you can glean from your topic or question.
Once you conduct a keyword search, check the related keywords within your results.
Use synonyms for your keywords as you search to discover additional sources.

Let's look at a sample research question: How do current pollution events affect our food systems and health?

Remove unnecessary words to identify keywords
Think about synonyms that may be used for some of your keywords
In this example, we could also search "contamination," "agriculture," and "agribusiness"

Phrase Searching

To increase the chance of locating sources relevant to your specific search terms, try using phrase searching
For words sitting together, enclose the terms in quotation marks. For example, if you are looking at cell systems, you can enter your search as "cell systems"
Remember the purpose of quotation marks is to eliminate search results that are unrelated to your topic, but if we use too many words in our phrase, we may limit the search so narrowly that we find no results.
Use words and phrases likely to be used by others relative to your topic/field

Boolean Operators

Use Boolean operators to narrow or expand your search scope:

Use Boolean OR to search either word in your search.

Google Scholar searches scholarly sources like academic publishers, professional societies, repositories, university websites, and more. Instead of their typical Google algorithms, Google Scholar uses rankings with more weight given to the full text, author, publication location, and citation in other scholarly literature.

Explore Research Tools

Features 3 concise, self-paced modules to guide novice researchers through searching for and using appropriate sources in writing.

These self-paced modules are especially useful for those wishing to increase their research impact. Topics include funding and grant writing, technical writing skills, finding the right journal for your manuscript, and more.

A tool created to help researchers explore methods concepts, help design research projects, understand particular methods or identify a new method, conduct their research, and write up their findings.

Physics Open Access Resources

An open-access archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics.

OA physics journals provided by AIP (American Institute of Physics) Publishing Open Access Journals.

Search open access books and journals provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press.

Open access articles and journals in the field of High-Energy Physics.

Physics Databases

A comprehensive scholarly, multidisciplinary database, with more than 5,500 full-text periodicals from the American Chemical Society.

Provides integrated access to the world's most comprehensive and authoritative source of references, substances and reactions in chemistry and related sciences.

Please register HERE for an account before accessing SciFinder Scholar.

Provides reviews of current mathematical literature published worldwide and includes some material in computer science, physics, and astronomy.

Review articles surveying recent work aimed at physics graduate students and non specialists.

Science & Technology Databases

Access to over 80 full-text journals published by the Institute of Physics.

Contains over 820 leading full text journals covering relevant aspects of the scientific and technical community.

A resource for students studying both the applied and general sciences.

An abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature delivering a comprehensive overview of the world's research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities.


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