Guides: GRASP Research Experience for Undergraduates: Journal Articles

Discipline Specific Databases

The resources listed here provide indexing to publications from broad disciplines such as engineering, medicine, biology and physics. They employ controlled vocabularies, or subject headings, to organize the material.

Compendex
The broad subject areas of engineering and applied science are comprehensively represented. Coverage includes nuclear technology, bioengineering, transportation, chemical and process engineering, light and optical technology, agricultural engineering and food technology, computers and data processing, applied physics, electronics and communications, control, civil, mechanical, materials, petroleum, aerospace and automotive engineering as well as narrower subtopics within all these and other major engineering fields.
PubMed
NLM's public access version to Medline, the premier database for biomedical literature.
BIOSIS Previews
The world's most comprehensive reference database in the life sciences. It covers original research reports and reviews in biological and biomedical areas.
The world's most comprehensive reference database in the life sciences. It covers original research reports and reviews in biological and biomedical areas. Coverage includes traditional areas of biology, such as botany, zoology and microbiology, as well as related fields such as plant and animal science, agriculture, pharmacology and ecology. Interdisplinary fields such as biochemistry, biophysics, and bioengineering are also included. Resources in all languages are represented. Updated monthly.

Major Engineering Content Collections

Here is a sample list of major content providers for Engineering that Penn Libraries subscribes to. It is by no means a comprehensive list, but these do provide a significant amount of relevant material for NBIC projects. Please see the Engineering Library website for access to additional collections.

IEEE Xplore
ACM Digital Library
The ACM Digital Library contains the fulltext of journals, magazines, transactions, proceedings, newsletters, and publications by Affiliated Organizations, Special Interest Groups (SIGs) back to 1947.
ScienceDirect (Elsevier)
Wiley Interscience
SpringerLINK
SPIE Digital Library
The SPIE Digital Library provides access to the full text of more than 200,000 technical papers from International Society for Optical Engineering journals and conference proceedings from 1990 to the present. It covers topics such as optics, photonics, electronic and biomedical imaging, sensing, communications and fiber optics, and micro- and nano-technology.
American Society of Mechanical Engineers Journals

Multidisciplinary and Citation Databases

These resources index literature from a broad range of disciplines but do not employ controlled vocabularies. They do, however, track citations to and from publications that may be used to find relationships in the literature and as an indicator of a publication's relative importance in a field.

Web of Science
Indexes journals in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Allows for cited reference searching. Includes Science Citation Index, the Social Science Citation Index, and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Search for specific articles by subject, author, journal, and/or author address, as well as for articles that cite a known author or work.
Scopus
Indexes most peer reviewed journals in science, technology, and medicine, and many in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Scopus also includes a number of trade publications and conference papers, and can perform author and affiliation searching.
Google Scholar
Access to Google Scholar with Penn-only links to full-text articles. Once authenticated through Penn's proxy, full-text articles to which Penn Libraries subscribe will become available within the Google Scholar search results.

Finding Full-Text

So, you've found an article in a database and now you want to read the full text. Look for the PennText link or button in the article's detailed record.

Click on PennText to open a page with options for obtaining the full-text (see below for a screen capture).

If it is available online, there will be a link you can follow to the journal.
If it's not available online, follow the second link to check the Franklin Catalog to see if it is available in print.
If it's not found in Franklin, use the third option to submit a request for the item through Interlibrary Loan.