Oxford LibGuides: Materials Science: Home

Finding books for materials science

Oxford has a wide range of ebooks for Materials Science and printed books, including the main science collection in the Radcliffe Science Library. For more detailed info about our book collections visit our books page of this guide.

SOLO
Search SOLO, the University's resource discovery tool, for print and ebooks at Oxford. You can search by author, title or subject and limit to a specific library or online resources.
SOLO user guide
If you need help with SOLO, take a look at this guide for tips on searching, managing results and using your SOLO account.

Key journals

A lot of journals, as well as being available in print, are available online and can be searched via SOLO or eJournals A-Z. Below are a few of the top journals for Materials Science below but you can find a longer list on the journals page of this guide.

Nature reviews. Materials
Nature Reviews Materials aims to cover the making, measuring, modelling and manufacturing of materials - thus, looking at materials science throughout the pipeline of laboratory discovery to functional device.
Nature Materials
Nature Materials is a monthly multi-disciplinary journal aimed at bringing together cutting-edge research across the entire spectrum of materials science and engineering. It covers all applied and fundamental aspects of the synthesis/processing, structure/composition, properties and performance of materials, where "materials" are identified as substances in the condensed states (liquid, solid, colloidal) designed or manipulated for technological ends.
Advanced Materials
Weekly interdisciplinary journal comprising research articles, reviews, and perspectives at the cutting edge of the chemistry and physics of functional materials.
Advanced energy materials
Advanced Energy Materials is an international, interdisciplinary, English-language forum of original peer-reviewed contributions on materials used in all forms of energy harvesting, conversion and storage.
Progress in materials science
Progress in Materials Science publishes authoritative and critical reviews of recent advances in the science of materials and their exploitation in engineering and other applications.

Key databases

Oxford subscribes to many bibliographic databases. They can be used to locate journal articles, conference proceedings, books, patents, images, data and more. You can find some of the key databases for Materials Science below, but take a look at the databases page of this guide for more titles.

ChemSpider
ChemSpider is a free service providing access to millions of chemical structures and integration to a multitude of other online services. ChemSpider is the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information.
PubChem
Alternative name: Pub Chem

PubChem provides information on the biological activities of small molecules.
PubChem Compound: Search unique chemical structures using names, synonyms or keywords. Links to available biological property information are provided for each compound.
PubChem Substance: Search deposited chemical substance records using names, synonyms or keywords. Links to biological property information and depositor web sites are provided.
PubChem BioAssay: Search bioassay records using terms from the bioassay description, for example "cancer cell line". Links to active compounds and bioassay results are provided.
Structure Search: Search PubChem's Compound database using a chemical structure as the query. Structures may be sketched or specified by SMILES, MOL files, or other formats.
Reaxys
Reaxys Academic Edition (RAE) has extensive coverage of quality, authoritative information in chemistry, medicinal chemistry and pharmacology data.

• It covers organic, inorganic and organometallic chemistry dating as far back as 1771.
• It includes over 179 million organic, inorganic and organometallic substances, 57 million chemical reactions, over 86 million documents from over 16 000 chemistry-related periodicals, and 500M searchable experimental properties including substance property, spectral and reaction data. It indexes over 35 million patents from 105 patent offices with abstracts and claims translated into English.
• It is the world’s largest medicinal chemistry database with over 43 million bioactivity data points, 34+ million unique substances with bioactivity, 32,000+ unique targets, and 54,000+ species.
• It provides fast access to published synthesis routes and augments knowledge with robust predicted routes by applying AI.

Reaxys Academic Edition (RAE) comprises three modules: Reaxys, Reaxys Medicinal Chemistry and Reaxys Predictive Retrosynthesis.
SciFinder
This resource requires you to register before use.
Alternative name: Sci Finder Scholar

SciFinder on the Web is a research discovery tool that allows you to explore the world’s literature in Chemistry and related scientific disciplines including biochemistry, biomedical sciences, chemical engineering, materials science, pharmacology, agriculture, etc. The CAS information service indexes and abstracts information from more than 10000 major scientific journals, 57 patent authorities around the world, conference proceedings, technical reports, etc and produces the following databases:
CAplus (Scientific Literature and Patents)
CAS REGISTRY (Chemical Substances)
CASREACT (Reactions)
CHEMCATS (Chemical Catalogs)
CHEMLIST (Regulated Chemicals)
MARPAT (Markush Structures)
SCOPUS
Scopus is a bibliographic database for science, medicine and some social sciences. It covers 15,000 journals from 4,000 publishers worldwide, providing access to over 33 million abstracts going back as far as 1869.
It includes the content from a number of other major databases: Medline (medicine) 1966 - , Embase (medicine) 1970 - , Compendex (engineering) 1970 - , Geobase (geography) 1980 - .
SPIE Digital Library
SPIE (the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers) aims to advance light-based technologies. The SPIE Digital Library is the most extensive resource available on optics and photonics, and includes all papers published since 1962 in SPIE's peer-reviewed journals, more than 350 ebooks with 25 new titles added annually, and 10,500+ volumes of SPIE conference proceedings
SpringerMaterials 1961-
Alternative name: Springer Materials
SpringerMaterials is the most comprehensive platform on materials data, providing information on more than 290,000 materials, over 3,000 properties, and their applications. It offers access to major materials science data sources including the Landolt-Börnstein book series, and other specialized materials science databases.

Please note that access to the 2019/2020 content will be available until 31st December 2020.
Web of Science
Alternative names: WoK ; WoS ; Web of Knowledge. Provides access to and cross-searching of databases in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine, social sciences and humanities. It includes Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Data Citation Index. Also provides access to Journal Citation Reports for sciences and social sciences.

Databases A-Z
A full, browsable list of Oxford's online databases.
SOLO
Search SOLO, the University's resource discovery tool, for print and ebooks at Oxford. You can search by author, title or subject and limit to a specific library or online resources.

Subject Librarian, Physical and Applied Sciences

Rachel Scanlon

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Email Me

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Radcliffe Science Library

01865 272824

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Key libraries

Radcliffe Science Library
The Radcliffe Science Library (RSL) is Oxford University's main teaching and research science library.
Materials Science Library
This library is located in the Materials Science Department

Materials Science: Home

Purpose of this guide