And if you need some gentle persuasion to start using databases to find relevant information, listen to our podcast make databases your friend.
Visit the Library podcasts page for full details of how to listen.

If you haven't used a database before, or you would like a refresher course, there are detailed instructions on my Research skills: Literature search techniques pages. You'll find the How to find journal articles section especially useful.

• Philosophers Index Coverage: 1940+
  The most useful database for philosophy research is without doubt Philosopher's Index. It provides indexing and abstracts of scholarly research published in journals and books, including contributions to anthologies and book reviews. The database covers the fifteen fields of philosophy: aesthetics, axiology, philosophy of education, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of history, philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, metaphilosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of science, social philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. The Philosopher's Index contains research published since 1940 including nearly 570 journals from 43 countries with content representing a variety of languages.

  A plea: Access to the Philosopher's Index database by members of the University of Adelaide community is limited by licence restrictions. Please be sure to logout as soon as you have finished searching so that other users can gain access.

• Philpapers
  PhilPapers is a directory of online philosophy articles and books by academic philosophers. It monitors journals in many areas of philosophy, as well as archives and personal pages. You can search for items containing a given keyword via the search box at the top of each page, but I recommend you use the advanced search page which lets you set up much more complex searches. Advanced searches can be saved for later use, can be used to build bibliographies, and can be monitored for new material.
  User accounts are not compulsory, and you can browse PhilPapers listings without one. But creating an account enables many useful functions, including personal reading lists and bibliographies, participation in the discussion forums, submission and editing of items, and much else. Every user has a profile page, which contains lists of the user's works and their areas of interest, among other things, and which can be made public or private as the user chooses.
  In the journal archive, you can browse all online issues of more than 200 journals in philosophy. Current staff and students of the University of Adelaide can seamlessly download the full text of articles in the archive to which we subscribe.

A Citation index enables you to find articles published at a later date which cite a particular key reference (journal article, book, conference paper, etc.). A research trail can be followed forward from the year an article is published.
Moving from a known reference to more recent articles which cite it is an excellent way to follow scholarly discussion on a given topic. Researchers also use the number of citations to their own papers as a measure of the impact of their research: the higher the number of citations, the greater the impact.
Cited reference searching is a two-step process. First, you look up the reference you are interested in - you can search by cited author, cited work, or cited year - then you ask the database to retrieve the articles that cite that reference.

• The Web of Science database includes the Sciences citation index, the Social sciences citation index, and the Arts & Humanities citation index, from 1980 to date. Search by author, keyword or citation.
  Web of Science is the best-known citation index.



• Scopus: a large database with an emphasis on science but which indexes over 2800 social sciences, humanities journal titles. Covers 1980 onwards for topic searching: from 1996 onwards Scopus allows cited reference searching to find articles that have cited a given article.



• Journal Citation Reports: a useful adjunct to the citation indexes, JCR is a comprehensive resource for journal evaluation using citation data drawn from scholarly and technical journals from more than 60 countries, and covering virtually all areas of science, technology, and social sciences. It provides rankings and impact factors by listing the most frequently cited journals in a field. Citation and article counts are important indicators of how frequently current researchers are using individual journals. By tabulating and aggregating citation and article counts, JCR offers a unique perspective for journal evaluation and comparison.

• Academic search premier Indexes and provides abstracts of articles from over 8,000 journals. Of these, full text is provided for over 4,600 journals, and more than 3,600 are peer-reviewed.
  Coverage: social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, physics, chemistry, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, ethnic studies.
  Academic search premier is one of the Ebscohost research databases to which the Library subscribes.



• Academic OneFile A collection of peer-reviewed, full-text articles in HTML and PDF format from more than 8,000 journals with extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, and literature. The publisher maintains a complete listing of journals covered by Academic OneFile, with details of dates of coverage.



• JSTOR Not strictly a database but a searchable collection from volume 1 onwards of over 270 core journal titles in many disciplines. I've had very good results using it to track down citations for specific articles when not all the details were known. Coverage extends to all volumes except for the last few years, so don't use it to find articles on very recent topics.
  JSTOR citations can be exported in EndNote-compatible format [don't know about EndNote bibliographical software? - visit the EndNote page].
  Note to my academic colleagues: JSTOR provides a stable URL for every article, which you can copy and paste into MyUni.



• MathSciNet The American Mathematical Society's Mathematical Reviews has provided reviews of the world's current mathematical literature since 1940. MathSciNet is a searchable database of those reviews, and provides abstracts and bibliographic information for much of the mathematical sciences literature. Citation data for journals, authors, articles and reviews is included which allows users to track the history and influence of research publications in the mathematical sciences. MathSciNet contains over 2 million items and over 1 million direct links to original articles. Over 100,000 new items are added each year.



• Periodicals index online (PIO) Formerly called Periodicals Contents Index (PCI) this huge database indexes millions of articles published in the arts, humanities and social sciences over the past 300 years.
  From the PIO results screen there is a link to Periodicals Archive Online which provides access to hundreds of online journals.



• Australian public affairs - full text: APA-FT
  Includes citations (from 1978 onwards) and some full text (from 1995 onwards) for journal articles, selected newspaper articles, conference papers and books in Australian business, health, current affairs, economics, humanities, law, literature, politics and social sciences. If APA-FT is not available, use APAIS (see below):



• APAIS (citations only) (Australian Public Affairs Information Service) [part of the AUSTROM group of databases]. Index only; not full text. Use if APA-FT is not available (see above).

• LLBA Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts. Citations to international literature on the nature, use, and teaching of language and also speech, communication and linguistics. Indexes journal articles, books, technical reports, dissertations, book reviews. Coverage 1973+



• MLA MLA (Modern Language Association) International Bibliography is a subject index to journal articles and books on modern languages, literatures, folklore, linguistics, cultural studies, film studies and Media. It covers from 1925 onwards and contains over 1.7 million citations from more than 4,400 journals. The majority of records are from English-language publications, but at least sixty other languages are represented including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Swedish.



• ERIC Indexes Current index to journals in education (CIJE) and Resources in education (RIE). A U.S. Department of Education database covering the journal and research literature in the field of education research and practice. The world's largest source of education information, containing abstracts of documents and journal articles.



• PsycINFO Psychological abstracts. Citations and abstracts of journal articles, book chapters, books, and technical reports in the field of psychology and psychological aspects of related disciplines including medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business, and law. Coverage 1983+



• Sociological abstracts. Coverage 1963+. An index with abstracts (1974+) to journals, conference papers, book reviews, books in sociology, social policy, psychology and social sciences, especially those dealing with culture and society.



• Libraries Australia (Kinetica). Use this database to find which Australian libraries hold a particular book or journal.
  Note: Use Advanced search and change all of these to exact match or starts with. Apply the Journals limit when searching for journals.
  If you do not find a journal in Libraries Australia, search SIAL: Serials in Australian Libraries which includes a few extra older journal holdings. We've provided an online help guide showing you how to use it.



• British Library Integrated Catalogue Search for details of over 12 million books and other material from 1450 to the present day.

Alerts and Saved searches

Many databases allow you to save your searches on their servers and will alert you when new articles on your topic are added to their files. Databases that index citations, such as Scopus and World of Science, will also let you create document citation alerts. This means that you will be notified when a selected article is cited by another article.
A database Alert will usually be sent to you by email, or you may be able to sign up for an RSS feed. [Not sure about RSS? Here's a straightforward explanation].
To set up an Alert you typically have to register with the database by filling in an online form with your contact details. You will usually also be asked to assign yourself a username and a password.
For example, if you want to set up Search history/Alerts on the database Academic Search Premier you click on the tab at the top of the page labelled Sign In to My EBSCOhost. When the Sign in page appears, click on the tab labelled I'm a new user, fill in the registration form, then click the Submit button. Shortly after you will receive an email confirming that you have an account registered with My EBSCOhost.
Once you have registered you can set your Preferences for future searching - just click on the word Preferences under the Academic Search Premier Search box. Here you can choose from different format options for your search results. You can do things like select your preferred citation format (the Author/Date system is one of the options) and have the database save items in a file formatted for EndNote (and other popular bibliographic formats). You can direct that the formatted file be emailed to you if you wish.

You'll find that the process of setting up an Alert is pretty similar on most databases. It's well worth doing if you need to be sure to have the latest information that is published in your area of interest.

Indexes to newspapers

• Factiva Indexes all major Australian newspapers; provides facts and numbers from nearly 9,000 sources in 22 languages, including influential local, national and international newspapers, leading business magazines, trade publications, and newswires.
  If you haven't used Factiva before, I strongly suggest you have a look at the Factiva help pages before you start searching.



• Elibrary A database of full-text newspapers including Australian newspapers, full-text magazines, newswires, classic books, maps, and photographs, as well as major works of literature and art.



• Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre This resource provides access to many Australian and New Zealand newspapers in full text, including News Ltd. publications.

The Library has an excellent and constantly expanding collection of electronic databases - indexes to published material on a topic. The main emphasis is on journal articles, but often they also index important chapters in edited books, conference proceedings and other sources.
Some are indexes only: they provide a full reference so that you can find the article referred to. Remember that by no means all the journals indexed by a particular database will be in the Barr Smith Library's collections. If you find an article that is important to you, and it isn't available in our Library either in paper format or as an online subscription, you can make use of our Document delivery service.
Some databases will provide full text of the articles either directly, or by linking you to the journal's website through the Library catalogue.
Most databases will allow you to mark results that you want to follow up and many let you email your marked results, and/or the full text of articles, to your own email address.

I've listed on this page the Library's databases that are most likely to be of use for philosophy research.
They are all available through the Library Catalogue, using the 'Electronic Resources' Limit, but here I've provided short cuts.
Don't forget, though, that there are many traditional printed resources in the Barr Smith Library's Reference collection that could be useful; see me for more information.

If you are embarking on a thesis you should consult these indexes to theses/dissertations as early as possible; not only is it interesting to see what work has been done on your thesis topic, it is crucial, if you are doing a higher degree, to ensure that your actual thesis topic is original.

• ProQuest Dissertations and Theses [formerly Dissertation abstracts]. An index to doctoral dissertations (theses) submitted to accredited North American universities and colleges, and some international universities, from 1637 onwards.
  Citations from 1980 include a 350-word abstract. From 1997, in addition to the abstract, you can read a preview comprising the first 24 pages of the thesis. Masters theses published since 1988 include 150-word abstracts. You can also download the complete text of each thesis in .pdf format, but you will need to pay for that (in February 2008 the cost was US$35.00).



• Index to theses Theses accepted for higher degrees by the universities of Great Britain and Ireland.



• Australasian Digital Theses Program The University of Adelaide is a member of the ADT program which is building a distributed database of theses in digitised format from Australian universities. Search or browse the database, and find out how to deposit a thesis in the database.

How to access the databases

You'll find information about how to access them on the page for each individual database in the lists above.
Databases for which the Library has purchased a network licence may be accessed remotely, if you are a current member of the University of Adelaide community, from your home or office computer. The remote user login page has information about using your Username and Password to get remote access to databases and other electronic resources.

Please note:-- The terms of our licence agreements with suppliers strictly limit remote access to electronic databases to enrolled students and staff members of the University of Adelaide.

If you need help with   philosophy databases,   click the button

BACK TO MY PHILOSOPHY RESOURCES WEBSITE TABLE OF CONTENTS

This page was created and is maintained by Alan Keig