LSC Graduate Student Orientation : Literature Searching

As a researcher at UW-Madison, you have access to a wealth of information!  We subscribe to thousands of journals, hundreds of databases, and and have over 8 million unique book titles in the campus libraries. If you can't find the article or book in our collections, we can almost always get you a copy through interlibrary loan.

Please contact us if you need assistance. We can help with article databases, provide guidance for literature reviews, identify journals for publishing your work, and more.  

AskSEL@library.wisc.edu

You can access databases from the library home page. Use the dropdown menu at the Catalog button to navigate to Databases. We subscribe to many databases that index scientific literature. 

There are several ways to access databases: 

1) Search by the title of the database (for example, 'PubMed')

2) Use the Browse by Subject/Type page to discover databases that index literature on your research topic

3) Visit the Top 10 Databases page to access commonly used databases. 

The databases listed below are popular starting points for most science topics:

Follow    (Find It button) or the "Find It at UW Madison" link in most databases to:

• access online full text (when available)
• see if the journal or book is available in print if it is not accessible online
• request a free pdf of the article or book chapter if full text is not available online (Request a Copy)

If you already have a citation, use this Citation Search to search for your article.

UW-Madison students, faculty, and staff have free access to The New York Times Digital and Wall Street Journal Online through the UW-Madison Libraries. Register for access and create an account by following the steps below.

BrowZine is available for UW-Madison students, faculty and staff. BrowZine lets you browse, read, save, and monitor scholarly journals in your subject areas on your mobile device or desktop/laptop.

Journal Citation Reports

Compares and evaluates 7500+ journals in the sciences, technology, health sciences and social sciences and calculates their Impact Factor, Eigenfactor, and field-based journal rankings.

Caveats

Various criticisms have been raised about impact factor,  including its validity (it is highly discipline-dependent) and the effect that journal editorial policies can have on it (policies can potentially boost a journal's impact factor).

Find out more about journal, article, and author metrics from the Bibliometrics and Citation Analysis guide.