Sciences for Continuing Education: Finding articles

Here are two key bibliographic databases covering Science in general. The subject pages in this guide give resources for specific branches of Science.

You can also go to Databases A-Z, click the All Subjects tab and scroll down to select a subject of your choice

If you're looking for a particular journal article, you can search for the journal title in SOLO. SOLO will find references to both print and electronic journals. You can access e-journals from the PCs in the Library or in the Student Resource Room at Ewert House.

You can also click on the 'Articles' tab and search for the article.

 You can use the Journal Articles search on SOLO  to find articles on your topic - just click the 'Articles' tab and enter your search. You will be able to access many articles online. You can use all the usual SOLO tools for refining your search, sorting results and you can save results to your e-Shelf. For more information, see the SOLO Guide

You can also search for journal articles in Google Scholar and use the 'Find it @ Oxford' link to the to access electronic versions. Scholar is the largest database of scholarly literature and gives you quick, relevant results. However, it lacks search tools and gives too many results sometimes.

For more structured literature searching you should use a bibliographic database. These act as subject indexes to journals and often include conference papers, research reports, book extracts etc. as well. Most databases are linked to Oxford holdings - look for the 'Find it @ Oxford' link.

If you know the title of the database you wish to use (for example one from the list on the left) you can search for it on SOLO. To browse a list of available bibliographic databases, go to Databases A-Z, click on the All Subjects tab, scroll down and select the subject of your choice - Biological Sciences, Physics, Zoology etc. Select  All Database Types then click on the type of database you require.

Using a bibliographic databases enables you to conduct a more precise search. You can also check the coverage of the database. Make use of on screen help and links to help text, Tutorials etc to get the best out of a database.

Here are some tips to get the best out of Google Scholar:

• Use as many relevant keywords as possible when searching.
• If you have a phrase "put it in quotation marks"
• Use a minus sign before a word to exclude it from the search.
• On campus you will have links to 'Find it at Oxford', off campus you can activate these by searching for Oxford on the Library Links option in Scholar Preferences.