Home: Scholar's Research Toolbox (FACULTY): Discovery Tools

Traditional Library Catalogs and Databases

The library provides tools to discover materials based upon the type of data (format, steps in the information process), and based upon discipline.

The basic information can be discovered in:

Academic Search Complete - our aggregator which contains fulltext articles from core journals across many fields.
Central Index. Articles from thousands of journals across many disciplines, plus many ebooks. (INFO)
Facts/Definitions tools which help you begin your research by exploring important terminology, uncovering key facts and trends, and reviewing encyclopedia and handbook entries.
the latest news on a popular topic use our News Resources page.
Look for books covering your topic using our Book Catalog and consider expanding your search to our 90 consortial I-Share libraries.

You may also want to expand your search using additional journal-index databases from our subject guides.

Scopus provides article coverage and table-of-contents for over 5,000 journals ... focusing on science, mathematics, medicine, technology, and the social sciences. Scopus provides autoalert options, links to fulltext and to ILL document delivery services, and citation tracking, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper, and SCImago Journal Rank through its Journal Analyzer.

JournalTOCs is is the largest free collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs).
JournalTOCs alerts you when new issues of your followed journals are published.

See our Autoalerts page to set automatic notifications for saved searches in these tools.

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

"The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is an international organization that, through leadership and innovation, promotes the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations. The NDLTD encourages and supports the efforts of institutes of higher education and their communities to develop electronic publishing and digital libraries (including repositories), thus enabling them to share knowledge more effectively in order to unlock the potential benefits worldwide".

DSpace@MIT

"MIT's institutional repository built to save, share, and search MIT's digital research materials including an increasing number of conference papers, images, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, preprints, technical reports, theses, working papers, and more".
Proquest Dissertation and Thesis
PQDT Open provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge.

You can quickly and easily locate dissertations and theses relevant to your discipline, and view the complete text in PDF format.
The authors of these dissertations and theses have opted to publish as open access. Open Access Publishing is a new service offered by ProQuest's UMI Dissertation Publishing.

Try the Listen Notes podcast search engine.

Alltop allows you to browse through many news services and blogs at one time.

You can use a search tool meant just for finding blogs, such as BlogSearchEngine.org

Directory of Open Access Repositories

OpenDOAR is a directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.
Directory of Open Acces Journals

Quality: For a journal to be included it should exercise quality control on submitted papers through an editor, editorial board and/or a peer-review system.

Subject: all scientific and scholarly subjects are covered
Types of resource: scientific and scholarly periodicals that publish research or review papers in full text.
Acceptable sources: academic, government, commercial, non-profit private sources are all acceptable.
Level: the target group for included journals should be primarily researchers.
Content: a substantive part of the journal should consist of research papers. All content should be available in full text.
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PLoS ONE

PLoS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication. PLoS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. It provides:

Open-access—freely accessible online, authors retain copyright
Fast publication times
Peer review by expert, practicing researchers
Post-publication tools to indicate quality and impact
Community-based dialogue on articles
Worldwide media coverage
PLoS ONE is published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit organization.

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This and other peer-reviewed journals are published by PLoS: Public Library of Science.
F1000 Posters
F1000 Posters is a unique open access repository for posters and slide presentations across biology and medicine. By keeping the work visible long after a meeting has ended it maximizes the return on the time, effort and money invested in creating each presentation. We also accept depositions from local meetings (e.g. PhD student days). F1000 Posters has received positive responses from presenters and societies alike, and we have support from leading journals and publishers including Nature, PNAS, Elsevier, BMJ, BioMed Central, PLoS, SAGE etc.

Search and Discovery

While this is not a search engine, the Creative Commons search tool allows discovery of media resources from other search providers.