SOIL SCI 728 Graduate Seminar (Fall 2024; Spring 2025) : Searching the Research Literature

Selecting and Searching Databases by Subject or Type

You can access databases from the library home page (library.wisc.edu). Use the dropdown menu at the Catalog button to navigate to Databases.

There are several ways to browse and to select databases:

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

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 quickly access a selection of popularly-used databases.

Consider the databases listed, below, for conducting your search of the research literature.

ACSESS Digital Library (Alliance of Crop, Soil and Environmental Science Societies)
Collection of journal and e-book content published by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America.
Agriculture and Environmental Science
Cross-disciplinary database of full-text content along with indexing of global literature across these fields and related disciplines.
ASABE Technical Library (American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers)
Access to more than 1,500 information resources, including technical papers from meetings and conferences, peer-reviewed journal articles, a membership magazine, textbooks, reference books, and standards.
CAB Abstracts
Comprehensive database of the applied life sciences including animal and crop production, environmental impacts, nutrition, soil science, and veterinary science.
GeoRef (Geology, Geosciences)
Produced by the American Geosciences Institute, this database indexes earth sciences literature of the world.
Google Scholar
Multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly articles.
Note: Accessing Google Scholar through our libraries will help you to bypass paywalls (i.e retrieve more full-text through our subscriptions).
Scopus
Large, multidisciplinary database that covers engineering, science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. Includes tools to track, analyze, and visualize research.
Web of Science
Collection of databases that index the world’s leading scholarly literature in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, as published in journals, conference proceedings, symposia, and more. Includes citation network data.

Get the Full Text

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

get online full text (when available)
see if the journal is available in print (Library Catalog)
request a copy of the article if full text is not available online ("Request a Copy" link)

If you have a known article or citation for which you need to retrieve the full-text, run an Articles search from the library site or use this Citation Search.

Searching Tips for Online Databases

Use AND to combine search terms; retrieve records with those terms, in any order: friends AND communication
Use OR to combine similar search terms or synonyms: friends OR peers
Use quotation marks ( " ") to search a required phrase: "interpersonal communication"
Use an asterisk ( * ) to retrieve singular and plural forms or suffixes for search terns: friend* = friend, friends, friendly or friendship
Review "subject headings" or "descriptors" to identify additional and useful search terms.
Apply limits or filters to your results (by date, document type, or other).