Finding materials relevant to your research and studies can be a daunting task. With over 3 million books and subscriptions to thousands of journals, some in hardcopy but an increasing number in digital form we have a wide variety of tools and strategies to help you find what you need. The guidance provided below can help you navigate to the most useful resources that we have for accessing our holdings for Earth & Planetary Science.
The information provided below is focused on general strategies and resources that are appropriate across many of the sub-disciplines within E&PS. More specific information for individual sub-disciplines can be found under the "Specific Topic Areas" menu on the left.
You can discover and access articles to use in your research in multiple ways:
To find a specific online journal that you would like to browse you can use our Find Journals feature to search by journal title.
If you have the citation for an article and you would like to determine if we have access to it through our many subscriptions and collections you can use our Article Finder search tool to find it.
If you don't have a specific journal or article in mind for your search you probably want to use one or more of the databases that we subscribe to to search for articles that are relevant to your research topic. Below are listed some of the key Earth & Planetary Science databases that you might want to consider using as a starting point in your research.
While specific search options vary somewhat between databases, the following general guidelines are useful when composing your search terms:
Think about your topic and separate it into separate concepts
1) Vocabulary - Synonyms
2) Search construction - Boolean logic/Set theory
Connect synonyms with the 'OR'
Connect separate concepts with 'AND'
3) Defining search phrases - Place phrases (i.e. words that occur together in a specific order) you want to search for in quotes to signal that the search should be executed as a phrase search instead of a search for a list of individual words.
Multidisciplinary collection of citations and abstracts for scholarly journal articles, proceedings, data sets, and other resources. Has a tool for citation analysis. Includes the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, among others.
Comprehensive source for chemical information on the upgraded SciFinder-n platform. Locate journal articles, dissertations, patents, synthesis plans, spectra, and more. Can search by structure or physical property.
Account required. Note: See the SciFinder Guide or contact Holly Surbaugh for details. Coverage 1907-present.
This multidisciplinary resource contains access to scholarly journals, book reviews, magazine articles, newspaper articles, books, videos, and trade publications in English and a wide variety of other languages. Coverage: 1887-present
A comprehensive archive of multidisciplinary scholarly journals and books. Coverage: 1800s to 3-5 years ago; Includes ARTstor - images across the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences with tools to view, present, and manage images for research and teaching. Coverage: ancient times to today.
In addition, here is a list of government databases that might also be relevant in your research.
We have a large collection of both physical books and ebooks in our collections for your use. Most of them are discoverable through our campus' library catalogs, but some also appear in a number of specialized databases to which we subscribe. Core catalogs that you will want to use in your search for books include:
If you find a book that we don't have in our collections in either hardcopy or ebook form you can request it through out interlibrary loan service:
Access to Earth Science data is critical to modern data-intensive research. While the number of key data resources is rapidly growing, the list provided below is a starting point for some key data resources in E&PS.
