2. Find academic articles
For broad help with finding academic articles visit our Finding Academic Articles learning resource.
There are many places you can find academic articles, but the easiest way is to search in library databases. By searching within a database, you can search multiple journals at once. There isn’t one database that has everything, so it’s important to search across multiple databases.
Databases and journals
Explore the databases and journals below for articles broadly in the information technology.
IEEE Xplore provides access to abstracts and full-text of: IEEE journals, transactions, and magazines, IEEE conference proceedings and current IEEE standards.
The ACM Digital Library is a vast collection of citations and full text from ACM journal and newsletter articles and conference proceedings.
Science Direct offers the full text of peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters on a range of disciplines, including computer science, cyber security and information systems.
Multidisciplinary database with high quality peer reviewed articles.it allows you to see what has cited literature since it was first published.
The Web of Science interface includes Web of Science Core Collections including the Arts & humanities citation index, Conference Proceedings Citation Indexes, Current Chemical Reactions and Book Citation Indexes.
- Proceedings of the IEEEProceedings of the IEEE is the leading journal to provide in-depth review, survey, and tutorial coverage of the technical developments in electronics, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science.
- Journal of the Association for Computing MachineryThe Journal of the ACM (JACM) provides coverage of the most significant work on principles of computer science, broadly construed.
- Nature Machine IntelligenceNature Machine Intelligence publishes high-quality original research and reviews in a wide range of topics in machine learning, robotics and AI. We also explore and discuss the significant impact that these fields are beginning to have on other scientific disciplines as well as many aspects of society and industry.
- ACM Computing SurveysThe primary purpose of the ACM Computing Surveys is to present new specialties and help practitioners and researchers stay abreast of all areas in the rapidly evolving field of computing.
- IEEE networkIEEE Network covers the following areas: 1. network protocols and architectures, 2. Protocol design and validation, 3. Communication software and its development and test, 4. Network control and signalling, 5. network management, 6. Practical network implementations including local area networks, (LANs), metropolitan area networks (MANs), and wide area networks, (WANs), 7. Switching and processing in integrated (voice/data) networks and network components, 8. Micro-to-host communication.
- Science roboticsScience Robotics provides a much-needed forum for the latest technological advances and for the critical social, ethical and policy issues surrounding robotics.
- IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligenceIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence publishes articles on all traditional areas of computer vision and image understanding, all traditional areas of pattern analysis and recognition, and selected areas of machine intelligence, with a particular emphasis on machine learning for pattern analysis.
- ACM Transactions on GraphicsA high-quality peer-reviewed journal in the area of computer graphics.
- Foundations and trends in machine learningFoundations and Trends® in Machine Learning publishes high-quality survey and tutorial monographs of the field.
Database search example
Below is an example of an advanced search option you’ll find in most databases. It has multiple search boxes with the Boolean operator, AND, listed on the left-hand side. Each concept has been entered into a search box and joined by AND.
Click on the +plus icons to learn about each search technique demonstrated.
Activity overview
This interactive activity shows an image of the library advanced search bars filled in with an example search as follows:
"internet of things"
AND (security OR privacy)
AND diabet*
There are 3 selectable icons that explain each of the search techniques used in this advanced search.
Technique 1: Grouping your words
Use quotation marks to search for words in an exact order. This is called phrase searching.
Brackets can also be used to group keywords together, so they are searched first.
Technique 2: Operators
Using the OR word between terms broadens a search to show results that contain any of the terms.
Using AND narrows the search to show results that contain all of the terms.
Technique 3: Using symbols
Add an asterisk to the end of a keyword to find variant word endings. This is called truncation. This example of diabet* will find diabetes, diabetic, diabetics, diabetogenic and diabetologist.
To learn more, watch the video What are boolean operators?