List of Academic Databases and Search Engines

This page contains a representative list of major databases and search engines useful in an academic setting for finding and accessing articles in academic journals, or in repositories, archives, or other collections of scientific and other articles. 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
  • bibliographic databases for information about databases giving bibliographic information about finding books and journal articles.

Note that "free" or "subscription" can refer both to the availability of the database or of the journal articles included. This has been indicated as precisely as possible in the lists below.

Name Discipline(s) Description Access Cost Provider(s)
Academic Publications eJournal Multidisciplinary science (student based) Student driven research abstracts, posters, articles, science specific search engine, public forum Free APeJ search
Academic Reference and Research Index Multidisciplinary Academic search engine for college students including only web sites recommended by teachers, librarians, and library and educational consortia Free Dr. Michael Bell
Academic Search Multidisciplinary Several versions: Complete, Elite, Premier, and Alumni Edition Subscription EBSCO Publishing
Aerospace & High Technology Database Aerospace, Aeronautics, Astronautics Subscription ProQuest
AJOL: African Journals OnLine Multidisciplinary Scholarly journals published in Africa Free abstracts; Subscription full-text African Journals OnLine
AgeLine Sociology, Gerontology Includes information on aging-related topics, including economics, public health and policy. Subscription EBSCO Publishing
AGRICOLA: Agricultural Online Access Agriculture Free & Subscription 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Material includes unique grey literature such as unpublished scientific and technical reports, theses, conference papers, government publications, and more.

Free Produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. http://agris.fao.org AGRIS
Airiti Inc Multidisciplinary China, Taiwan. Subscription Airiti Inc
Analytical Abstracts Chemistry Subscription Royal Society of Chemistry
Analytical sciences digital library Analytical sciences Free National Science Digital Library and the Analytical Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society
Anthropological Index Online Anthropology Index only (no abstracts or full-text). Free Royal Anthropological Institute
Anthropological Literature Anthropology Free to Harvard faculty, staff and students. Subscription for non-Harvard access. Maintained by Harvard University. Non-Harvard access provided by OCLC
Arachne Archaeology, Art history German language Free German Archaeological Institute & the University of Cologne, administered by Reinhard Foertsch
Arastirmax Multidisciplinary, Scientific Publication Index Reviewed Scientific Journals and articles Free Arastirmax.com
Arnetminer Computer Science Online service used to index and search academic social networks Free Tsinghua University
Arts & Humanities Citation Index Arts, Humanities Part of Web of Science Subscription Thomson Reuters
arXiv Physics, Mathematics, Computer science, Nonlinear sciences, Quantitative biology and Statistics Free Cornell University
Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library Computer Science, Engineering Subscription Association for Computing Machinery
Astrophysics Data System Astrophysics, Geophysics, Physics Free Harvard University
ATLA Religion Database Religious studies Provides information on topics such as biblical studies, world religions, church history, and religion in social issues Subscription
AULIMP: Air University Library's Index to Military Periodicals Military Science Free Air University
Autochtonia Multidisciplinary Database grouping more than 12.000 references about First Nations in Quebec, Canada and the rest of the world. Free Produced by Dialog, Réseau de recherche et de connaissances relatives aux peuples autochtones
BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine Multidisciplinary Free Bielefeld University
Beilstein database Organic chemistry Subscription Available from Elsevier under the product name Reaxys
Biological Abstracts Biology A complete collection of bibliographic references covering life science and biomedical research literature published from more than 4,000 journals internationally. Subscription Available from Thomson Reuters
BioOne Biology, Ecology, and Environmental Science An aggregation of over 78,000 peer-reviewed, full-text articles on current research in Biodiversity Conservation, Biology, Ecology, Plant Sciences, Entomology, Ornithology, and Zoology. Free Abstract & References, Subscription Collections, and an Open Access Collection Available from BioOne
Bioinformatic Harvester Biology, Bioinformatics A meta search engine for 50 major bioinformatic databases and projects. Free Available from Liebel-Lab KIT Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Book Review Index Online Book reviews Subscription Thomson Gale
Books In Print Books Subscription R.R. Bowker
CAB Abstracts Applied Life Sciences Bibliographic information service providing access to applied life sciences literature. Subscription CABI
Chemical Abstracts Service Chemistry Subscription American Chemical Society
ChemXSeer Chemistry Free Pennsylvania State University
Chinese Social Science Citation Index Social sciences Subscription Nanjing University
Cochrane Library Medicine, Healthcare Includes reviews of research to promote evidence-based healthcare. Subscription Wiley Interscience
CINAHL: Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Nursing, Allied Health Subscription EBSCO
CHBD: Circumpolar Health Bibliographic Database Medicine Free University of Calgary
Citebase Search Mathematics, Computer science, Physics Semi-autonomous citation index of free online research Free University of Southampton
CiteULike Computer science Free
CiteSeer Computer Science Replaced by CiteSeerX. Free Pennsylvania State University
CiteSeerX Computer Science Free Pennsylvania State University
CogPrints: Cognitive Sciences Eprint Archives Science (General) Free University of Southampton
The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Computer science Free Alf-Christian Achilles
Compendex Engineering Electronic version of Engineering Index. Subscription Elsevier
CORE Multidisciplinary The CORE (COnnecting REpositories) system aggregates millions of metadata records and full-text scholarly papers from hundreds of Open Access repositories. Free The Open University
Current Index to Statistics Statistics Limited free search Subscription American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Current Contents Multidisciplinary Part of Web of Knowledge. Contains 7 discipline-specific subsets. Subscription Thomson Reuters
Directory of Open Access Journals Journals Free Lund University
DBLP Computer science Comprehensive list of papers from major computer science conferences and journals Free University of Trier, Germany
EconLit Economics The American Economic Association's electronic database, the world's foremost source of references to economic literature. Subscription Produced by the American Economic Association. Available from CSA, DIALOG, OCLC, OVID, and AEA.
EdITLib Education Over 30,000 peer-reviewed articles and conference papers covering the topics of educational technology and e-learning. Free abstracts; Subscription full-text Published by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, along with the Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education.
EMBASE Biomedicine, Pharmacology Biomedical database with a strong focus on drug and pharmaceutical research. Subscription Elsevier
ERIC: Educational Resource Information Center Education Education literature and resources. Provides access to over 1.3 million records dating back to 1966. Free Produced by the United States Department of Education. Also available by subscription from OCLC, CSA.
Food Science and Technology Abstracts Food science, Food technology, Nutrition The world's leading database of information on food science, food technology and nutrition Subscription Produced by the International Food Information Service. Access provided by OVID, Web of Knowledge, Dialog, DataStar and STN International
FreeFullPDF Life sciences, Health sciences, Physics, Engineering, Social sciences, Humanities Scholarly open access resources. Links to full-text (Over 80 million of free scientific publications, based upon a customized Google search) Free Produced by the company KnowMade, access at http://www.freefullpdf.com/
GENESIS Women's history Descriptions of women's history collections from sources in the UK, as well as women's history websites. Free London Metropolitan University
Global Health Public Health Specialist bibliographic, abstracting and indexing datatabase dedicated to public health research and practice. Subscription CABI
Google Scholar Multidisciplinary Free Google
GoPubMed Medicine Free Transinsight GmbH
HAL Multidisciplinary HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemiation of scientific research papers, whether they are published or not, and for PhD dissertations. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. Documents with full text: 202,658; simple references: 407,040 (in September 2012). Free Provided by the CCSD (Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), access available in French and English at http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/
HubMed Medicine An alternative interface to the PubMed medical literature database Free Alf Eaton
IEEE Xplore Computer Science, Engineering, Electronics Subscription IEEE
Index Copernicus Multidisciplinary science Scientific journal database – the IC Journal Master List – contains currently over 2,500 journals from all over the world, including 700 journals from Poland. The journals registered in this database underwent rigorous, multidimensional parameterization, proving high quality. The Ministry of Science and Higher Education acknowledged the IC Journal Master List by placing it on the list of scored databases, for being indexed in IC JML journals get additional points in the Ministry’s evaluation process. Free Index Copernicus International
Information Bridge: Department of Energy Scientific and Technical Information 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 (DOE) 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. Free United States Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information
Informit Multidisciplinary Australasian aggregator of bibliographic databases and journals RMIT Publishing
IngentaConnect Multidisciplinary Free searching; Subscription full-text Ingenta
Indian Citation Index (ICI) Multidisciplinary Indian Citation Index (ICI) 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. Subscription ICI
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. Subscription IET
Interred educational search engine Multidisciplinary Is a semantic web search engine for education. Free Interred
International Directory of Philosophy Philosophy Contains information on university philosophy departments and programs, philosophical societies, research centers, journals, and philosophy publishers around the world. Subscription Philosophy Documentation Center
Intute Multidisciplinary Serves students, teachers, and researchers in UK further education and higher education, offering a selection of around 300,000 academic websites which have been hand-picked and described by subject specialists. Free Intute
Intwine database Arts and Humanities Allows the searching of the full-text of all academic websites catalogued by the Intute arts and humanities service from 2005–2010. Free Intwine
JournalSeek Multidisciplinary Open access journals in different language Links to journal's home page and publishers JournalSeek
JSTOR: Journal Storage Multidisciplinary (Historical) Subscription JSTOR
JournalSeek Multidisciplinary Open access journals in different language Links to journal's home page and publishers JournalSeek
JURN Arts and Humanities Full-text search and retrieval from 4,000 open access ejournals in the arts and humanities. Free JURN
Lesson Planet Education (K-12) Over 400,000 teacher-reviewed classroom resources including lesson plans, worksheets, educational videos, and education articles. Free Abstract; Subscription full-text Lesson Planet
LexisNexis Law (general) Electronic database for legal and public-records related information Subscription Reed Elsevier
MathSciNet Mathematics Available in print as Mathematical Reviews Subscription American Mathematical Society
MedlinePlus Medicine Free 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. Free Mendeley
Merck Index Chemistry, Biology, Pharmacology Also available in print. Subscription Produced by Merck & Co.. Available from CambridgeSoft Corporation, Dialog, Knovel, MedicinesComplete, STN International
Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts Meteorology, Astrophysics, Geology Subscription Produced by the American Meteorological Society. Available from Dialog and CSA.
Microsoft Academic Search Computer Science and a limited extent on information science Provides many innovative ways to explore scientific papers, conferences, journals, and authors Free Microsoft
NBER: National Bureau of Economic Research Economics Free National Bureau of Economic Research
National Criminal Justice Reference Service Criminology, Sociology Abstracts of scholarly journal articles, agency and NGO reports, and conference proceedings Free 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 Free OCLC
Open J-Gate Journals Index of open access journals Free Informatics India Ltd.
OpenSIGLE Grey literature Indexes European grey literature. Free Institut de l'information scientifique et technique
Philosophy Documentation Center eCollection Applied ethics, Philosophy, Religious studies Journals, series, conference proceedings, and other works from several countries online. Free abstract & preview; Subscription full-text Philosophy Documentation Center
Philosophy Research Index Philosophy Index of books, journals, disserations, and other documents Subscription Philosophy Documentation Center
PhilPapers Philosophy Free PhilPapers
POIESIS: Philosophy Online Serials Philosophy, applied ethics, religious studies Journals and series, online access for institutions with print Free abstract & preview; Subscription full-text Philosophy Documentation Center
PsycINFO Psychology The largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. It contains over 2.6 million citations and summaries dating as far back as the early 19th century. Subscription Produced by the APA. Available from several database vendors.
Pubget Multidisciplinary Subscription Pubget
PubMed Biomedical Free National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Library of Medicine
PubChem Chemistry Free National Center for Biotechnology Information and the U.S. National Library of Medicine
Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature Journals and Magazines Coverage: 1983–present. Subscription H. W. Wilson Company
Reader's Guide Retrospective: 1890–1982 Journals and Magazines Subscription H. W. Wilson Company
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics Economics Free Volunteer Collaboration
Rock's Backpages Music Primary documents from the history of rock and roll Subscription. Limited free access with registration. Backpages Limited
Russian Science Citation Index Scientific journals A bibliographic database of scientific publications in Russian. Free Scientific Electronic Library
SafetyLit Multidisciplinary Citations and abstracts of journal articles and reports from researchers working in the more than 35 distinct professional disciplines (architecture - zoology) relevant to preventing unintentional injuries, violence, and self-harm. Free Graduate School of Public Health, San Diego State University and the World Health Organization, Department of Violence and Injury Prevention
SciDiver.com Multidisciplinary SciDiver is an academic paper search engine for the physical sciences.

The service currently maintains an index over arXiv, the preprint service for mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative finance and related disciplines; expansion to additional repositories is expected in the course of the site's continued development.

Free Scidiver.com
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. Free 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. Free United States Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
Science Citation Index Science (General) Part of Web of Science Subscription Thomson Reuters
ScienceDirect Multidisciplinary Subscription Elsevier
Scirus Science (General) Free Elsevier
Scopus Multidisciplinary Subscription Elsevier
SearchTeam Multidisciplinary Students search together collaboratively for scholarly articles and resources Free Zakta
Shamaa Education Education literature and resources in the Arab World. Covering English, Arabic and French documents, 2007-ongoing. Free Produced by the Arab Educational Information Network.
Social Science Citation Index Social science Part of Web of Science Subscription Thomson Reuters
Socol@r: Socolar Multidisciplinary Scholarly open access resources in different language Free abstracts; Links to full-text Socolar
SSRN: Social Science Research Network Social science Contains an abstracts database and a electronic paper collection, arranged by discipline. Free Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc.
SSRRN: Social Science Research Resources Network Social science Indexes datasets and statistical codes Free Social Science Research Resources Network =
SPIRES-HEP Physics, (High Energy) Free Stanford Linear Accelerator Center & partners
SpringerLink Multidisciplinary Free abstract & preview; Subscription full-text Springer
Symbolab Math & Science Searches scientific content and mathematical expression semantically Free Symbolab
Udemy Multidisciplinary Allows anyone to teach and learn online through videos, webinars, forums, and more. Free Udemy
Ulrich's Periodicals Directory Periodicals Subscription Proquest
VADLO Biomedicine, Life science Categories indexed: Protocols, Online tools, Powerpoints, Databases, Software Free VADLO
VET-Bib Social Science, Education European vocational education and training (VET) literature Free European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training
Web of Knowledge Multidisciplinary Includes other products, such as Web of Science, Biological Abstracts & The Zoological Record Subscription Thomson Reuters
Web of Science Science (General) Includes other products, such as Social Science Citation Index & Science Citation Index. Subscription Thomson Reuters
WestLaw Law (General) Subscription Thomson Reuters
WorldCat Multidisciplinary Unified catalog of member libraries' catalogs Free & Subscription 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. Free 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. Subscription Springer Science+Business Media
The Zoological Record Zoology Unofficial register of scientific names & papers in Zoology. Coverage 1864–present. Subscription Thomson Reuters

Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, academic, search and/or engines:

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    Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)