LibGuides: EUREKA!: Mellon College of Science First-Year Experience: Searching databases and journal articles

What if I Just Want to Find a Particular Journal?

Use Our e-Journals A-Z List to Locate a Journal Hidden in a Fulltext Database

This automated list can point the user to the full text of articles while they're in a database with the "GET IT" button. The list keeps track of electronic journals even if the full text is buried in a general literature database like ProQuest or LexisNexis.

Don't Forget the Reference Librarian

If at any time you want us to double check to see if we have access to a particular journal, please don't hesitate to ask.

Finding Full-Text Articles

Use the Get it @ CMU links wherever you see them!

If you have citations for specific articles, check the Journal Search to see if we subscribe to the journal that contains the article. If the CMU library collection doesn't have what you're looking for, you can request an article scan via Interlibrary Loan.

Reference librarians are here to help you - so please contact us with any questions!

Key Databases by Subject

Biology

PubMed This link opens in a new window
Biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

Chemistry

Reaxys This link opens in a new window
A web access to comprehensive information of organic, inorganic, and organometallic compounds, their syntheses and properties that includes Crossfire Beilstein and Gmelin databases.

Math

ACM Digital Library This link opens in a new window
Full text of journal articles, conference proceedings, and reviews published by the Association for Computing Machinery.

Physics

arXiv.org This link opens in a new window
E-print database for physics and related fields.

Mutli-disciplinary

Web of Science This link opens in a new window
A multidisciplinary database, with searchable author abstracts, covering the literature of the sciences, social sciences and the arts & humanities providing indexes and links to cited references for each article.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
Academic database covering peer-reviewed journals, book series, and conference proceedings - includes scientific, medical, technical and social science topics, with emphasis on citation analysis. Scival feature requires registration but is free to CMU affiliates.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
"Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites." - About Google Scholar

Searching Databases

Most databases allow the use of AND, OR and NOT to broaden or narrow and search.

AND will narrow the search to include only records with both terms.
OR with broaden the search to include records with either term.
NOT will narrow the search to exclude records with one of the terms.

Truncation: You can use an * at the end of a word stem to broaden your search to include related terms. For example, to search for child, children or childhood use the search term child*

Putting quotes "" around words allows you to search for a phrase. For example, searching language development, without quotes, finds records with both the word 'language' and 'development' somewhere in the record. Searching "language development", with quotes, only find records with the phrase "language development".

Example: How does bilingualism affect language development in children?

NOTE: When you begin doing advanced searching in a new database, look for the Help or Information sections to determine how that database works, and how it may differ from other databases with which you are familiar.