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.
You can search within the databases below for articles broadly in the sciences. Alternatively, select the Journals tab to browse through a list of key scientific journals.
- Web of ScienceThe 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 and also hosts the following databases: Current Contents Connect, Biosis Citation Index (1926-2016), SciELO citation index, MEDLINE and Zoological record.
- ScopusScopus is the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and web sources, covering Life Sciences, Health Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences. This database includes some links to external full text articles.
- ScienceDirectScienceDirect provides indexing and full text of journal articles in the following subjects: Chemistry, Chemical Engineerin, Clinical Medicine, Computer Science, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Economics, Business and Management Science, Engineering, Energy, Environmental Science, Life Sciences, Materials Science, Mathematics, Physics,Astronomy, Social Science. Full text is only available for the journals to which Deakin University subscribes. The University has purchased a number of back issue journal sets from ScienceDirect. For many of these titles, the most current volumes will not be available in full text.
- PubMedPubMed is the National Library of Medicine's search service that provides access to more than 29 million citations in MEDLINE, PreMEDLINE, and other related databases, with links to participating online journals. This is a publically accessible version of Medline. PubMed is updated daily and will link to the full text of articles if they are available on the Internet
- NatureNature is a weekly international journal publishing the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions.
- ScienceScience has been at the center of important scientific discovery since its founding in 1880—with seed money from Thomas Edison. Today, Science continues to publish the very best in research across the sciences, with articles that consistently rank among the most cited in the world.
- Royal Society Open ScienceRoyal Society Open Science is an open journal publishing high-quality original research across the entire range of science on the basis of objective peer-review.
- Scientific ReportsScientific Reports is an open access journal publishing original research from across all areas of the natural sciences, psychology, medicine and engineering.
Note
We have additional sciences related guides in more specific fields, including:
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:
"environment dna"
AND (biodiversity OR "biologocial diversity")
AND austral*
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.
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 austral* will find Australia, Australian, Australasia, Australasian, australis and Australopithecus.