Physics and Astronomy Graduate Student Library Orientation
Sciences Reference and Outreach Librarian
Slides
Databases and catalogs for finding physics and astronomy literature
Use these tools to find scientific literature. Different tools cover different types of research outputs like books, articles, pre-print articles (that haven't been peer-reviewed yet), or conference proceedings. Databases and catalogs often include overlapping content, but each will also have unique content.
- InfoHawk+This is the UI Libraries catalog. Search it to find articles, books, electronic journals, databases, and much more.
- SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System This link opens in a new windowThe SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics.
- arXiv.org This link opens in a new windowarXiv is a pre-print (NOT peer-reviewed) and open-access archive for scholarly articles in the fields of physics and related fields.
- ScopusScopus is a citation database of peer-reviewed scientific journals, books and conference proceedings.
- Web of ScienceAnother citation database of peer-reviewed scientific journals, books and conference proceedings.
- IOPBooks This link opens in a new windowE-books published by IOP, the Institute of Physics. The University of Iowa does not subscribe to all content on this site.
- IOPscience This link opens in a new windowIOPscience is an online service for journal and book content published by IOP Publishing.
- AIP Publishing This link opens in a new windowThis is a gateway site to the journals, e-books, and conference proceedings published by the American Institute of Physics and AIP Member Societies. It also links to the magazine Physics Today. The University of Iowa has not purchased all the books found on this site--those books with a green check can be downloaded.
- SPIE Digital Library This link opens in a new windowUSERS MUST LOGIN ON CAMPUS. Articles on optics and photonics from SPIE journals and proceedings. Some full-text available, or request the full text through interlibrary loan.
- WorldCat This link opens in a new windowA bibliographic database of books and articles from around the world.
- JoVE Unlimited This link opens in a new windowA video journal demonstrating both the fundamental building blocks of common laboratory techniques and the newest, cutting-edge experiments in physics and astronomy.
If you are off campus and the link to an article does not work, try pasting the link into the proxy generator below to get an enhanced link which should work from anywhere.
If you find a record for an article or book but it doesn't have a full text link, you ask the libraries to get it from a different library for you using interlibrary loan.
Proxy link generator
Interlibrary loan
Link Google Scholar to UI Library subscriptions
You can use UI Link in Google Scholar! UI Link will help you find full-text PDFs for articles in UI's databases, or connect you with Inter-Library Loan, so you never have to pay for an article. Here's how:
1. Click on "Settings" near the top of the page.
2. Select "Library Links" from the left-side menu of the Settings page:
3. Search for the University of Iowa and select it from the list of libraries that comes up. (You can choose up to 5 libraries!)
4. Save your settings!
5. Now, when you search Google Scholar, "ViewIt@UILink" will appear next to articles that University databases have access to. Click the link and follow the prompts to your article.
