List of academic databases and search engines
This page contains a representative list of notable databases and search engines useful in an academic setting for finding and accessing articles in academic journals, institutional repositories, archives, or other collections of scientific and other articles. Databases and search engines differ substantially in terms of coverage and retrieval qualities. Users need to account for qualities and limitations of databases and search engines, especially those searching systematically for records such as in systematic reviews or meta-analyses.
As the distinction between a database and a search engine is unclear for these complex document retrieval systems, see:
- the general list of search engines for all-purpose search engines that can be used for academic purposes
- the article about bibliographic databases for information about databases giving bibliographic information about finding books and journal articles.
| Name | Discipline | Description | Access cost | Provider |
| Academic Search | Multidisciplinary | Several versions: Complete, Elite, Premier, and Alumni Edition | EBSCO Publishing | |
| Aerospace & High Technology Database | Aerospace, Aeronautics, Astronautics | ProQuest | ||
| African Journals OnLine | Multidisciplinary | Scholarly journals published in Africa | African Journals OnLine | |
| AgeLine | Sociology, Gerontology | Includes information on aging-related topics, including economics, public health and policy. | EBSCO Publishing | |
| AGRICOLA: Agricultural Online Access | Agriculture | Produced by the United States National Agricultural Library. Free access provided by NAL. Subscription access provided by ProQuest, OVID. | ||
| AGRIS: Agricultural database | Agriculture | Covers agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, aquatic sciences and fisheries, human nutrition, extension literature from over 100 participating countries. Material includes unique grey literature such as unpublished scientific and technical reports, theses, conference papers, government publications, and more. | Produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. AGRIS | |
| Airiti Inc | Multidisciplinary | Airiti Inc | ||
| Analytical Abstracts | Chemistry | Royal Society of Chemistry | ||
| Analytical sciences digital library | Analytical chemistry | National Science Digital Library and the Analytical Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society | ||
| Anthropological Index Online | Anthropology | Index only. | Royal Anthropological Institute | |
| Anthropological Literature | Anthropology | Maintained by Harvard University. Non-Harvard access provided by OCLC | ||
| Arachne | Archaeology, Art history | German language | German Archaeological Institute & the University of Cologne | |
| Arnetminer | Computer Science | Online service used to index and search academic social networks | Tsinghua University | |
| Arts & Humanities Citation Index | Arts, Humanities | Part of Web of Science | Clarivate Analytics | |
| arXiv | Physics, Mathematics, Computer science, Nonlinear sciences, Quantitative biology and Statistics | Repository of electronic pre-prints of papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance. | Cornell University | |
| ASCE Library | Civil Engineering | all civil engineering disciplines including structural engineering, geotechnical engineering, transportation engineering, construction engineering, environmental engineering, engineering mechanics, sustainability, water resources, irrigation. hydraulics, hydrology, waterways, urban planning, cold regions... | American Society of Civil Engineers | |
| Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library | Computer Science, Engineering | Association for Computing Machinery | ||
| Astrophysics Data System | Astrophysics, Geophysics, Physics | Harvard University | ||
| ATLA Religion Database | Religious studies | Provides information on topics such as biblical studies, world religions, church history, and religion in social issues | ||
| AULIMP: Air University Library's Index to Military Periodicals | Military Science | Air University | ||
| BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine | Multidisciplinary | Bielefeld University | ||
| Beilstein database | Organic chemistry | Available from Elsevier under the product name Reaxys | ||
| Bibliographie de civilisation médiévale | Medieval studies | A bibliography of monographs on the Middle Ages. As of 2018, it contains about 65,000 fully classified bibliographic records. | Produced by the University of Poitiers. Available from Brepols Publishers. | |
| Biological Abstracts | Biology | A complete collection of bibliographic references covering life science and biomedical research literature published from more than 4,000 journals internationally. | Available from Thomson Reuters | |
| BioOne | Biology, Ecology, and Environmental Science | A full-text aggregation of more than 180 scientific journals publishing current research in Biodiversity Conservation, Biology, Ecology, Environmental Science, Entomology, Ornithology, Plant Science, and Zoology. | Available from BioOne | |
| Bioinformatic Harvester | Biology, Bioinformatics | A meta search engine for 50 major bioinformatic databases and projects. Project appears to be not available anymore. | Available from Liebel-Lab KIT Karlsruhe Institute of Technology | |
| Book Review Index Online | Book reviews | Thomson Gale | ||
| Books In Print | Books | R. R. Bowker | ||
| CAB Abstracts | Applied life sciences | Bibliographic information service providing access to applied life sciences literature. | CABI | |
| Chemical Abstracts Service | Chemistry | American Chemical Society | ||
| Chemisches Zentralblatt Structural Database | Science, Chemistry | web-based retrieval application that provides language independent access to the information contained in Chemisches Zentralblatt | Available from the InfoChem | |
| ChemXSeer | Chemistry | the projects seems abandoned in 2018 | Pennsylvania State University | |
| Chinese Social Science Citation Index | Social sciences | Nanjing University | ||
| CINAHL: Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health | Nursing, Allied Health | EBSCO | ||
| CiNii | Multidisciplinary | Database of 15 million articles in the Japanese language from 3600 journals. | National Institute of Informatics | |
| CHBD: Circumpolar Health Bibliographic Database | Medicine | University of Calgary | ||
| Citebase Search | Mathematics, Computer science, Physics | Semi-autonomous citation index of free online research. Not available, ceased operations in 2013 | University of Southampton | |
| CiteULike | Computer science | Not available. Ceasing operations as of March 30, 2019 | ||
| CiteSeer | Computer Science | Replaced by CiteSeerX. | Pennsylvania State University | |
| CiteSeerX | Computer science, Statistics, Mathematics, becoming Multidisciplinary | Pennsylvania State University | ||
| Civil engineering database | Civil engineering | A bibliographic database covering all of ASCE's publications since 1872 | American Society of Civil Engineers | |
| Cochrane Library | Medicine, Healthcare | Includes reviews of research to promote evidence-based healthcare. | Wiley Interscience | |
| CogPrints: Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archives | Science | University of Southampton | ||
| The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies | Computer science | Alf-Christian Achilles | ||
| Compendex | Engineering | Electronic version of Engineering Index. | Elsevier | |
| COnnecting REpositories | Multidisciplinary | A full text aggregator with a mission to aggregate all open access papers from repositories and journals. It provides multiple services including search, discovery and raw data access services, i.e. access for machines to manuscript full texts via APIs. As of June 2020, CORE was with 20 million monthly active users among the most widely used open access infrastructures and ranks among top 4k websites in global internet engagement according to Alexa Traffic Rank. | Open University | |
| Current Index to Statistics | Statistics | Limited free search | American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics | |
| Current Contents | Multidisciplinary | Part of Web of Science. Contains 7 discipline-specific subsets. | Clarivate Analytics | |
| DeepDyve | Multidisciplinary | Free multidisciplinary search engine and reference organization tools, with subscription option for access to read-only content from more than 17,000 journals and 20 million articles | DeepDyve | |
| Dimensions | Multidisciplinary | More than 100 million publications, ranging from articles published in scholarly journals, books and book chapters, to preprints and conference proceedings. Contextualized with linked data sets, funding, publications, patents, clinical trials, and policy documents. Citation-based indicators and Altmetric attention scores. | Digital_Science | |
| Directory of Open Access Journals | Journals | The Directory Of Open Access Journals lists more than 10,000 open access journals in multiple research areas. | Lund University | |
| DBLP | Computer science | Comprehensive list of papers from major computer science conferences and journals | Produced by Leibniz Center for Informatics and University of Trier, Germany | |
| EconBiz | Economics | EconBiz supports research in and teaching of economics with a central entry point for all kinds of subject-specific information and direct access to full texts. | Produced by the ZBW- German National Library of Economics– Leibniz Information Centre for Economics | |
| EconLit | Economics | The American Economic Association's electronic database, the world's foremost source of references to economic literature. | Produced by the American Economic Association. Available from EBSCOhost, ProQuest, OVID, and AEA. | |
| EMBASE | Biomedicine, Pharmacology | Biomedical database with a strong focus on drug and pharmaceutical research. | Elsevier | |
| ERIC: Educational Resource Information Center | Education | Education literature and resources. Provides access to over 1.3 million records dating back to 1966. | Produced by the United States Department of Education. Also available by subscription from OCLC, CSA. | |
| Europe PMC | Biomedical | A database of biomedical and life sciences literature with access to full-text research articles and citations. Includes text mining tools and links to external molecular and medical data sets. A partner in PMC International. | EMBL-EBI | |
| FSTA – Food Science and Technology Abstracts | Food science, Food technology, Nutrition | The world's leading database of information on food science, food technology and nutrition | Produced by IFIS Publishing. FSTA can be accessed through EBSCOhost, IHS Inc., Ovid, Proquest Dialog, STN and Web of Science. | |
| GENESIS | Women's history | Descriptions of women's history collections from sources in the UK, as well as women's history websites. | London Metropolitan University | |
| GeoRef | Geosciences | American Geosciences Institute | ||
| Global Health | Public Health | Specialist bibliographic, abstracting and indexing database dedicated to public health research and practice. | CABI | |
| Golm Metabolome Database | Mass spectrometry | The Golm Metabolome Database is a reference mass spectra library of biologically active metabolites quantified using gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. | Golm Metabolome Database | |
| Google Scholar | Multidisciplinary | |||
| HCI Bibliography | Human-computer interface | An electronic bibliography for most of HCI for researchers, developers, educators, and students | Gary Perlman | |
| HubMed | Medicine | An alternative interface to the PubMed medical literature database | Alf Eaton | |
| IEEE Xplore | Computer Science, Engineering, Electronics | IEEE | ||
| Index Copernicus | Multidisciplinary science | Scientific journal database contains currently over 2,500 journals from all over the world, including 700 journals from Poland. IC's journal ranking system was criticized in 2013 by Jeffrey Beall because of the high proportion of predatory journals included in it and its suspect evaluation methodology; he characterized the resulting "IC Value" as "a pretty worthless measure". | Index Copernicus International | |
| Multidisciplinary | The Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information provides free public access to over 266,000 full-text documents and bibliographic citations of Department of Energy research report literature. Documents are primarily from 1991 forward and were produced by DOE, the DOE contractor community, and/or DOE grantees. Legacy documents are added as they become available in electronic format. | United States Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information | ||
| Informit | Multidisciplinary | Australasian aggregator of bibliographic databases and journals | RMIT Training Pty Ltd | |
| IngentaConnect | Multidisciplinary | Ingenta | ||
| Indian Citation Index | Multidisciplinary | Indian Citation Index is a home grown abstracts and citation database, with multidisciplinary objective knowledge contents from about 1000 top Indian scholarly journals. It provides powerful search engine to fulfill search and evaluation purposes for researchers, policy makers, decision makers etc. | ICI | |
| IARP | Multidisciplinary | Open-access knowledge management system incorporating grants, publications, conferences in natural and social & behavioral sciences. The site provides tools to build graphic reports. | Volunteer Collaboration | |
| Inspec | Physics, Engineering, Computer Science | The leading bibliographic database providing abstracts and indexing to the world's scientific and technical papers in physics, electrical engineering, electronics, communications, control engineering, computing, information technology, manufacturing, production, and mechanical engineering. | IET | |
| INSPIRE-HEP | Physics, | CERN, DESY, Fermilab, SLAC and IHEP | ||
| International Bibliography of Humanism and the Renaissance | Renaissance studies | A bibliography of academic publications on European culture and history in the 16th and 17th centuries. As of 2018, it contains about 355,000 fully classified bibliographic records. | Brepols Publishers | |
| International Directory of Philosophy | Philosophy | Contains information on university philosophy departments and programs, philosophical societies, research centers, journals, and philosophy publishers in the U.S., Canada, and approximately 130 other countries. | Philosophy Documentation Center | |
| International Medieval Bibliography | Medieval studies | A multidisciplinary bibliographic database covering Europe, North Africa and the Middle East for the entire period from AD 300 to 1500. As of 2018, it contains about 440,000 entries. | Produced by Leeds University. Available from Brepols Publishers. | |
| International Philosophical Bibliography | Philosophy | A bibliographic database focusing on the history of philosophy and continental philosophy. | Produced the Université Catholique de Louvain. Available from Peeters Publishers. | |
| J-Gate | All Scholarly Journals | J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global e-journal literature. J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles. | Available from J-Gate | |
| JournalSeek | Multidisciplinary | Open access journals in different language | JournalSeek | |
| JSTOR: Journal Storage | Multidisciplinary | JSTOR Collections: Current Journals; Archived Journals ; Books; and Primary Source Collections FREE Resources: 3 articles every 2 weeks. Also, early journals free, no registry necessary. | JSTOR | |
| Jurn | Multidisciplinary | Jurn is a free-to-use online search tool for finding and downloading free full-text scholarly works. In 2014 Jurn expanded beyond open access journals in the arts and humanities, to also index open journals in ecology, science, biomedical, business and economics. Jurn is actively curated and maintained. | Jurn | |
| L'Année philologique | Classical studies | Over 860,000 bibliographical entries, including keywords, abstracts, and links to the full text. | Produced by the Société Internationale de Bibliographie Classique. Available from Brepols Publishers. | |
| Lesson Planet | Education | Over 400,000 teacher-reviewed classroom resources including lesson plans, worksheets, educational videos, and education articles. | Lesson Planet | |
| LexisNexis | Law | Electronic database for legal and public-records related information | Reed Elsevier | |
| Lingbuzz | Linguistics | A free archive of linguistics articles, with a focus on syntax, semantics, phonology and morphology. | ||
| Linguamatics | Medicine, Healthcare, Patents | Interface for searching MEDLINE, ClinicalTrials.gov, FDA Drug Labels, PubMed Central, and Patent Abstracts. | ||
| Logeion | Classical Studies | A Journal of Ancient Theatre | - | |
| MathSciNet | Mathematics | Available in print as Mathematical Reviews | American Mathematical Society | |
| MEDLINE | Medicine, Healthcare | Easy-to-use interface to search and retrieve citations and abstracts for biomedical and health journals. | EBSCO | |
| MedlinePlus | Medicine | Produced by the United States National Library of Medicine, the United States National Institutes of Health, and the United States Department of Health and Human Services | ||
| Mendeley | Multidisciplinary | The Mendeley research catalog is a crowdsourced database of research documents. Researchers have uploaded nearly 100M documents into the catalog with additional contributions coming directly from subject repositories like Pubmed Central and Arxiv.org or web crawls. | Mendeley | |
| Merck Index | Chemistry, Biology, Pharmacology | Also available in print. | Formerly produced by Merck & Co., now available from the Royal Society of Chemistry | |
| Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts | Meteorology, Astrophysics, Geology | Produced by the American Meteorological Society. Available from Dialog and CSA. | ||
| NBER: National Bureau of Economic Research | Economics | National Bureau of Economic Research | ||
| Microsoft Academic | Multidisciplinary | Provides many innovative ways to explore scientific papers, conferences, journals, and authors | Microsoft | |
| MyScienceWork | Science | Database includes more than 70 million scientific publications and 12 million patents. | MyScienceWork | |
| National Criminal Justice Reference Service | Criminology, Sociology | Abstracts of scholarly journal articles, agency and NGO reports, and conference proceedings | United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs | |
| National Diet Library Collection | Multidisciplinary | Japanese. Catalog for the National Library of Japan. | National Diet Library | |
| OAIster | Multidisciplinary | OCLC | ||
| OpenEdition.org | Humanities, social science | OpenEdition offers the academic community four international-scale publication and information platforms in the humanities and social sciences | Cléo CNRS EHESS University of Avignon | |
| OpenSIGLE | Grey literature | Indexes European grey literature. | Institut de l'information scientifique et technique | |
| Paperity | Multidisciplinary | Aggregator of open access journals and papers. Contains more than 1,500,000 full-text articles and 4,200 journals covering all academic disciplines and different languages. Provides full-text article search, RSS feeds and a mobile application to access the literature. | Paperity | |
| Philosophy Documentation Center eCollection | Applied ethics, Philosophy, Religious studies | Journals, series, conference proceedings, and other works from several countries online. | Philosophy Documentation Center | |
| Philosophy Research Index | Philosophy | Index of books, journals, disserations, and other documents | Philosophy Documentation Center | |
| PhilPapers | Philosophy | PhilPapers | ||
| Philosophy, applied ethics, religious studies | Journals and series, online access for institutions with print | Philosophy Documentation Center | ||
| POPLINE | Population, Family Planning, Reproductive Health | POPLINE® contains the world's most comprehensive collection of population, family planning and related reproductive health and development literature. An international resource, POPLINE helps program managers, policy makers, and service providers in low- and middle-income countries and in development-supportive agencies and organizations gain access to journal articles and other scientific, technical, and programmatic publications. | Knowledge for Health, Center for Communication Programs, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health | |
| Project MUSE | Humanities, social science | Project MUSE is a provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community. MUSE provides full-text versions of scholarly journals and books. | Project MUSE, Johns Hopkins University Press | |
| PsycINFO | Psychology | The largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. It contains over 3.7 million records with bibliographic information and extensive indexing, more than 60 million cited references, and has comprehensive coverage dating back to the mid-19th century, with sporadic coverage going back as far as the 16th century. | Produced by the APA. Available from several database vendors. | |
| Psychology's Feminist Voices | Psychology | An online, multimedia digital archive containing the profiles of 250 feminist psychologists who have shaped and continue to transform the discipline of psychology. Profiles are organized in two sections, "Women Past" and "Feminist Presence." All profiles on the Feminist Presence section contain original interview transcripts and video clips with the psychologist discussing their feminist development and academic career. | Based at York University, Toronto, Canada. | |
| PubChem | Chemistry | National Center for Biotechnology Information and the U.S. National Library of Medicine | ||
| PubMed | Biomedical | A database primarily of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics | National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Library of Medicine | |
| PubPsych | Psychology | PubPsych is a free information retrieval system for psychological resources. It offers a comprehensive and balanced selection of resources from a growing number of international databases with a European focus, covering the needs of academic and professional psychologists. | Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information | |
| Questia: Online Research Library | Multidisciplinary | Questia | ||
| Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature | Journals and Magazines | Coverage: 1983–present. | H. W. Wilson Company | |
| Reader's Guide Retrospective: 1890–1982 | Journals and Magazines | H. W. Wilson Company | ||
| RePEc: Research Papers in Economics | Economics | Volunteer Collaboration | ||
| Rock's Backpages | Music | Primary documents from the history of rock and roll | . Limited free access with registration. | Backpages Limited |
| Russian Science Citation Index | Scientific journals | A bibliographic database of scientific publications in Russian. | Scientific Electronic Library | |
| SafetyLit | Multidisciplinary | Citations and abstracts of journal articles and reports from researchers working in the more than 35 distinct professional disciplines relevant to preventing unintentional injuries, violence, and self-harm. | SafetyLit Foundation in cooperation with the Graduate School of Public Health, San Diego State University and the World Health Organization's Department of Violence and Injury Prevention | |
| SciELO | Journals | SciELO is a bibliographic database and a model for cooperative electronic publishing in developing countries originally from Brazil. It contains 985 scientific journals from different countries in free and universal access, full-text format. | FAPESP, CNPq and BIREME | |
| Science.gov | Multidisciplinary | A gateway to government science information and research results. Science.gov provides a search of over 45 scientific databases and 200 million pages of science information with just one query, and is a gateway to over 2000 scientific Websites. | Science.gov Alliance, 18 scientific and technical organizations from 14 federal agencies that contribute to Science.gov. United States Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information serves as the operating agent for Science.gov. | |
| Science Accelerator | Multidisciplinary | A gateway to results of DOE research and development and major R&D accomplishments of interest to DOE. | United States Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information. | |
| Science Citation Index | Science | Part of Web of Science | Clarivate Analytics | |
| ScienceOpen | Multidisciplinary | Search engine for natural and physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Incorporates arXiv, PubMed, and SciELO. Integrated with ORCID for overlay and peer review services. All articles display Altmetric scores. | ScienceOpen | |
| Scientific Information Database | Engineering & Technology, Medical Science, Basic Science, Human Sciences | It is a free bank with multipurpose goals, containing Engineering & Technology, Medical, Basic Science, Human Sciences papers. | Scientific Information Database | |
| SCIndeks - Serbian Citation Index | Multidisciplinary | A combination of an online multidisciplinary bibliographic database, a national citation index, an Open Access full-text journal repository and an electronic publishing platform. | CEON/CEES - Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science, Serbia | |
| Science Direct | Science including Medicine | Elsevier | ||
| Scopus | Multidisciplinary | Scopus is the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research literature. It contains over 20,500 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers. While it is a subscription product, authors can review and update their profiles via ORCID.org or by first searching for their profile at the free Scopus author lookup page. | Elsevier | |
| SearchTeam | Multidisciplinary | Students search together collaboratively for scholarly articles and resources | Zakta | |
| Semantic Scholar | Multidisciplinary | It is designed to quickly highlight the most important papers and identify the connections between them. It currently includes on computer science and biomedical publications. | Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence | |
| Social Science Citation Index | Social science | Part of Web of Science | Clarivate Analytics | |
| Socol@r: Socolar | Multidisciplinary | Scholarly open access resources in different language | Socolar | |
| SPRESI Database | Science, Chemistry | chemical structure and reaction database, product name: SPRESIweb, SPRESImobile | Available from InfoChem | |
| SSRN: Social Science Research Network | Social science | Contains an abstracts database and an electronic paper collection, arranged by discipline. | Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. | |
| Sparrho | Multidisciplinary | Sparrho is a personalised platform that allows users to discover, curate and share over 60 million scientific research articles and patents from 45k+ journals and preprint servers. | Sparrho | |
| SpringerLink | Multidisciplinary | Springer | ||
| Ulrich's Periodicals Directory | Periodicals | ProQuest | ||
| VET-Bib | Social Science, Education | European vocational education and training literature | European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training | |
| Web of Science | Multidisciplinary | Includes other products, such as Social Science Citation Index, Science Citation Index, Biological Abstracts & The Zoological Record | Clarivate Analytics | |
| WestLaw | Law | Thomson Reuters | ||
| WorldCat | Multidisciplinary | Unified catalog of member libraries' catalogs | OCLC | |
| WorldWideScience | Multidisciplinary | WorldWideScience is a global science gateway composed of national and international scientific databases and portals. WorldWideScience accelerates scientific discovery and progress by providing one-stop searching of databases from around the world. Multilingual WorldWideScience provides real-time searching and translation of globally dispersed multilingual scientific literature. | The WorldWideScience Alliance, a multilateral partnership, consists of participating member countries and provides the governance structure for WorldWideScience. United States Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information serves as the operating agent for WorldWideScience. | |
| Zasshi Kiji Sakuin: Japanese Periodicals Index | Journals | Japanese. | National Diet Library's Online Catalog, MagazinePlus, CiNii | |
| Zentralblatt MATH | Mathematics | First three records free without subscription. | Springer Science+Business Media | |
| The Zoological Record | Zoology | Unofficial register of scientific names & papers in Zoology. Coverage 1864–present. | Clarivate Analytics |