Key subject collections

Databases provide searchable collections of articles or papers, reports and other information from academic and scholarly journals and sources, use them to search on a specific topic.

Most important databases for your studies =

These give bibliographic references and short summaries of individual journal articles and the full text to many (but not all) of the articles themselves.

  • Academic Search Complete
    Journals from all subject areas, including science, however access to the current year is not available for many journals.

  • American Chemical Society online journal and archive package
    Browse the A-Z list of peer reviewed research journals in the chemical and related sciences – full text access to articles or search using topic keywords.

  • Oxford Chemistry Primers
    Published by Oxford University Press, the Oxford Chemistry Primers are a series of short texts providing accounts of a range of essential topics in chemistry and chemical engineering. They are written for undergraduate study and are invaluable as a source of material commonly presented in lectures. There are 100+ titles in the series.

  • Royal Society of Chemistry Journals Archive 1841 – 2004
    Access to the full text of journals from 1841-2004 in chemistry and related areas including medicinal drug discovery.

  • Science Direct (Publisher Elsevier)
    All subject areas of science and medicine and including chemistry, herbal medicinal science, pharmacology and pharmaceutical science. Full text access to most articles from 1997 onwards to most (but not all) journals.

  • Wiley Online Library
    All areas of science, including chemistry, herbal medicinal science, pharmacology and pharmaceutical science. Full text access to many (but not all) journals and a few books.

These are comprehensive and international; they give bibliographic references and detailed abstracts or summaries of individual journal articles, but not the articles themselves but they may give links to free articles.

Although a particular database may not contain the full article, the Library often has access to the full article on another database. Go to the Library Catalogue and search by the journal name, not the article title listed on the database record. Once in the journal, type or copy and paste the beginning of the article title into the journal search box.

  • Web of Science (WoS)
    Essential for undergraduate students researching for projects, MSc, MPhil/PhD and staff undertaking research. Web of Science is an international database which covers world literature from many publishers, in all areas of science.
    Note: In WoS, change the ‘All Databases’ tab to ‘Web of ScienceTM Core Collection’.

  • PubMed
    International database from the US National Library of Medicine of millions records of journal papers in all aspects of life sciences, medicine, health and related subjects.

  • British National Formulary via Best Practice
    The database Best Practice provides access to the British National Formulary (BNF) online. BNF gives access to drug content, information on dosing, availability, formulations, side effects and contraindications. Once in the database, click on Resources at the top of the page and the Drug database.

  • ChemSpider
    ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry. It provides fast access to 40 plus million structures, properties and associated information. Search by chemical names such as systematic names, synonyms, trade names, database identifiers, search by chemical structure.

  • PubChem
    Open chemistry database of chemical molecules and their activities against biological assays. The system is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
  • BioMed Central
    290 free quality peer-reviewed journals in Biology, Clinical Medicine and Health.

  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
    Freely available full-text online journals from all disciplines. Searchable and browsable.

  • OMICS International
    700 plus online open access peer reviewed scholarly journals, 3000 plus conferences in all aspects of science including medical, clinical and pharmaceutical subjects.

  • PLOS
    Peer-reviewed, freely available journals in biosciences and medicine.
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