Online Resources and Databases

Resources for Alumni & Visitors

The following resources are freely available online. Many include full-text content of articles, technical reports, and research.

ADS: The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 6.8 million records: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and arXiv e-prints. The main body of data in the ADS consists of bibliographic records and full-text scans of much of the astronomical literature, plus access and pointers to a external resources, including electronic articles, data catalogs and archives.

arXiv.org: Open access to 476,730 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Statistics

CERN Document Server: Over 800,000 bibliographic records, including 360,000 fulltext documents, of interest to people working in particle physics and related areas. Covers preprints, articles, books, journals, photographs, etc.

CiteSeer: Scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

HighWire: A division of the Stanford University Libraries, HighWire Press hosts the largest repository of high impact, peer-reviewed content, with 1152 journals and 4,764,339 full text articles from over 140 scholarly publishers. HighWire-hosted publishers have collectively made 1,882,737 articles free.

Historical Indexes on American Engineering Topics: The text-searchable indexes in this group come from the engineering collections at the Linda Hall Library. The original print indexes date from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries.

NIST Chemistry WebBook: This site provides thermochemical, thermophysical, and ion energetics data compiled by NIST under the Standard Reference Data Program.

Open J-Gate: Open J-Gate provides access to millions of journal articles available online.

PLoS - Public Library of Science: nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource

PubMed: A service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, includes over 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.

Scitopia: Scitopia.org is a free federated vertical search portal including the publications of 15 scientific societies, patents from the European, Japanese and US patent offices, and full-text documents from the US Dept of Energy

SPIRES HEP Database: More than 500,000 high-energy physics related articles, including journal papers, preprints, e-prints, technical reports, conference papers and theses, comprehensively indexed by the SLAC and DESY libraries since 1974.

Federal R&D Project Summaries: Federal R&D Project Summaries provides a portal to more than 750,000 Federal research projects, complete with full-text single-query searching across databases residing at different agencies.

Science Accelerator: Resources made available by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), U.S. Department of Energy.

Science and Engineering Statistics: National Science Foundation - publications, data, and analyses about the nation's science and engineering resources.

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS): The NTRS collects scientific and technical information from NASA's technical report servers and non-NASA sites. Some full text is available.

Department of Energy (DOE) Information Bridge: DOE research and development reports produced by the DOE and the DOE contractor research and development community in physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy, and other topics.

Science.gov: Science.gov is a gateway to over 50 million pages of authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. government agencies, including research and development results

WorldWideScience.org: WorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway—accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases. Subsequent versions of WorldWideScience.org will offer access to additional sources as well as enhanced features. WorldWideScience.org was developed and is maintained by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), an element of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy.

Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI): CISTI, part of the National Research Council of Canada, provides technology, engineering, and medical information to thousands of public and private libraries and researchers from through this portal. CISTI's collection and its document delivery service are available to users through the online Catalogue and CISTI Source.

Biocatalysis/Biodegradation Database: This database contains information on microbial biocatalytic reactions and biodegradation pathways for primarily xenobiotic, chemical compounds. The goal of the UM-BBD is to provide information on microbial enzyme-catalyzed reactions that are important for biotechnology.

ChemIDPlus: A database providing access to structure and nomenclature authority databases used for the identification of chemical substances cited in NLM databases. ChemIDplus contains over 380,000 chemical records, of which over 289,000 include chemical structures. ChemIDplus is searchable by Name, Synonym, CAS Registry Number, Molecular Formula, Classification Code, Locator Code, Structure, and/or Physical properties. Enhanced structure display is available in ChemIDplus Advanced (http://chem.sis.nlm.nih.gov/chemidplus/chemidheavy.jsp).

Kaye & Laby Online: Tables of Physical & Chemical Constants: Includes the entire, unedited contents of the 16th edition (published 1995) and is crammed full of tables of data, formulae, graphs and charts. This information span topics from fundamental constants to fibre optics, superconductivity to Raman spectroscopy and many others.

Material Data Network: High quality, authoritative materials data information sources. For example: ASM International; The Welding Institute (TWI); National Physical Laboratory (UK); National Institute of Materials Science (Japan). Search for free, some content free, some free but requires registration, other content requires a subscription.

NIST Data Gateway: The NIST Data Gateway provides easy access to NIST scientific and technical data. These data cover a broad range of substances and properties from many different scientific disciplines. The Gateway includes links to selected free online NIST databases as well as to information on NIST databases available for purchase. Links are also provided to information on NIST Standard Reference Materials and NIST Calibration Services available for purchase.

ToxNet: Combined databases on toxicology, hazardous chemicals, environmental health, and toxic releases.

Sarah Lester
Engineering Library
engreference@stanford.edu

Last modified: June 16, 2008