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Through Lib4RI, you have access to a large number of databases. You can filter the list by topic or alphabetically and find a brief description of each of the databases.
AGRICOLA (AGRICultural OnLine Access) is a bibliographic database of citations to the agricultural literature created by the US National Agricultural Library (NAL) and its cooperators. This extensive database provides worldwide coverage of primary information sources in agriculture and related fields. The literature cited is primarily in English, but more than a third of the database comprises citations in Western European, Slavic, Asian and African languages. Production began in 1970, but the database covers materials in all formats, including printed works from the 15th century.
Note: This version of AGRICOLA retired on 1 Jan 2023 and no content is being added at this time. AGRICOLA, PubAg and NALDC have now been brought together in one place introducing SEARCH from the USDA National Agricultural Library.
Open databaseAGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology) is a global public domain database with more than 4 million structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. The database is maintained by FAO, and its content is provided by more than 150 participating institutions.
AGRIS covers the wide range of subjects related to agriculture, including forestry, aquatic sciences, and fisheries. Its content includes unique grey literature such as unpublished scientific and technical reports, theses, conference papers, government publications, and more.
The database is freely available on the website of the FAO.
Open databaseThe arXiv is an archive and distribution server for e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. It includes more than 2 million e-prints, with roughly 5,000 new e-prints added every month. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are placed on the arXiv. A majority of the manuscripts are also submitted to journals for publication, but some work, including some very influential papers, remain purely as e-prints and are never published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Note that users can register to automatically receive a listing of newly submitted papers in areas of interest to them
The ASM Materials Platform for Data Science contains over 75,000 phase diagrams, including binary, ternary, and multinary diagrams, all presented in a standardized format for easy comparison.
Open databaseBIOSIS Previews is a bibliographic database for literature searching in biological and biomedical sciences. It indexes about 5,500 life sciences journals, of which about 2,300 are indexed cover to cover. Additionally, 1,500 conference proceedings, review articles, books and U.S. Patents are included. BIOSIS covers medical topics, but tends to focus more on basic research, and its coverage of clinical medicine is not as in depth as in PubMed. BIOSIS is a good resource for finding document types that are not indexed in PubMed, including abstracts of papers presented at meetings, United States patents, books and book chapters. The thorough indexing of major concepts, organisms, taxonomic groups, diseases, genes and geographic locations makes it easy to narrow your search.
Note that BIOSIS can be searched from within Web of Science.
Open databaseThe Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) and FIZ Karlsruhe offer the free service Access Structures via their WebCSD portal to view and retrieve structures from their crystallographic databases CSD (organic compounds) and ICSD (inorganic compounds). Through Access Structures you can view the data sets in both 2D and 3D, see some basic information about the structures and download individual deposited data-sets.
This free service has its limitations regarding search capabilities offered. Please refer to more detailed information on WebCSD and the free Access Structures service.
For Advanced searches of inorganic structures (ICSD) please use this interface.
Open databaseChemSpider is a free chemical database providing fast text and structure search access to over 26 million structures. The database is owned and supported by the Royal Society of Chemistry. It aggregates structures, spectra, properties, suppliers, syntheses, and other information from hundreds of data sources into a single searchable repository with links back to the original data sources. ChemSpider is not just a search engine; it is also a crowdsourcing community for chemists who contribute their data, skills, and knowledge to the curation of the database.
ChemSpider SyntheticPages extends this model of a community curated database to cover reactions, providing quick publication (including the assignment of a DOI), peer review and semantic enhancement of repeatable reactions.
Open database
The Cochrane Library contains systematic reviews summarising current medical research. It is considered as a reliable source for evidence based medicine. Review summaries in German are also available.
Open databaseThe database provides bibliographic information (including abstracts) for 2.7 million dissertations and theses on sciences and engineering from 1861 to the present. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses mainly covers dissertations and theses from North American Institutions plus a growing international coverage. 1.2 million full text dissertations are available for download in PDF format. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and strong retrospective full text coverage for older graduate works.
Open databaseDryad is an open generalist data repository for communicating scholarly research.
Open databaseEnviDat is the WSL open data repository that supports a wide range of environmental research data.
Open databaseEnvironment Complete contains more than 2.4 million records from more than 2,200 domestic and international titles going back to 1888 (including over 1,350 active core titles) as well as more than 190 monographs. The database also contains full text for more than 920 journals.
Open databaseERIC is the Eawag Research Data Institutional Repository. ERIC is an open research data repository, and is separated into ERIC/open (open to the public) and ERIC/internal (only visible to Eawag employees).
Open databaseThe ETH Research Collection is the repository for publications and research data created at ETH Zurich.
Open databaseThe Forest Science Database database supplies bibliographic information and abstracts for all aspects of agroforestry, forestry, tree biology, land use and wood science. Climate change effects, deforestation, forest logging and urban forestry are also covered key areas.
Open databaseGreenFILE offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. The database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 384,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 4,700 records.
Open databaseThe ICSD contains inorganic crystal structures published since 1913, including their atomic coordinates. In particular, the database provides information on structural data of pure elements, minerals, metals, and intermetallic compounds; structural descriptors (Pearson symbol, ANX formula, Wyckoff sequences); bibliographic data; and synthesis conditions.
The content of ICSD goes through an ongoing re-evaluation and update procedure. Each year around 7,000 new structures are added while the existing content will be modified, complemented or duplicates are removed.
Detailed information on the ICSD may be found in the scientific manual.
Open databaseThe IEEE Xplore digital library is a resource for discovery of and access to scientific and technical content published by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and its publishing partners. Lib4RI provides access to many IEEE journals, magazines and transactions, IET journals and magazines, proceedings from IEEE and IET annual conferences, IEEE standards, and the backfiles for all titles.
Open databaseCERN, DESY, Fermilab and SLAC have built the next-generation High Energy Physics (HEP) information system, INSPIRE. It combines the successful SPIRES database content, curated at DESY, Fermilab and SLAC, with the Invenio digital library technology developed at CERN. INSPIRE is run by a collaboration of CERN, DESY, Fermilab, IHEP, and SLAC, and interacts closely with HEP publishers, arXiv.org, NASA-ADS, PDG, HEPDATA and other information resources.
More information and an overview on the INSPIRE project can be found here.
Open databaseThe Joint Accelerator Conferences Website (JACoW) is an international collaboration that publishes proceedings of accelerator conferences held around the world. All conferences agree to the policies and requirements for publication.
Open databaseLibrary, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) indexes more than 560 core journals, nearly 50 priority journals, and nearly 125 selective journals; plus books, research reports and proceedings. Subject coverage includes librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Coverage in the database extends back as far as the mid-1960s.
Open databaseLIVIVO is an interdisciplinary search engine for life sciences provided by ZB MED Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences.
Scientifically relevant information from the ZB MED subjects fields medicine, health, nutrition, environmental and agricultural sciences is bundled and provided on a standard interface for free research.
Please follow the tab «More Links» below a specific search result to obtain links to the full texts.
More information and help are available here.
Open databaseMassBank is a mass spectral database of experimentally acquired high resolution MS spectra of metabolites. It offers various query methods for standard spectra. The database has very detailed MS data and excellent spectral/structure searching utilities.
Open databaseMaterials Cloud is a combination open data repository and workflow platform for computational material sciences.
Open databaseMEDLINE is the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) premier life sciences database.
Explore biomedicine and life sciences, bioengineering, public health, clinical care, and plant and animal science. Search precisely with MeSH terms and CAS registry numbers; link to NCBI databases and PubMed Related Articles. Backfiles to 1950.
Note that MEDLINE can be searched from within Web of Science.
Open databaseThe Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a bibliographic database operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 8.7 million records: Astronomy & Astrophysics, Physics and arXiv e-prints. The main body of data in the ADS consists of bibliographic records (including abstracts). Older astronomy literature has been digitized, in many cases going back to the first issue of the journals, and is available in full-text versions. The physics literature goes back for varying periods depending on the collaborative partnerships.
ADS Labs showcases search tools with added functionality to the standard ADS services. Currently these are:
Streamlined Search is simple one-box search that allows for a combination of author, title, year, and keyword searches. Identifiers such as bibcodes, arXiv IDs and DOIs are recognized as well. Advanced search options allow users to specify the desired search criteria.
Alpha Fulltext Search is the experimental interface for searching the collection of electronic fulltext at ADS, the Digital Library for Physics and Astronomy. It allows searching the full text of the scanned literature in ADS as well as a select portion of the current astronomical literature, including ApJ, ApJS, AJ, A&A, MNRAS, PASP, the last 15 years of Icarus, and all of arXiv.org.
Open databaseThe NIST Data Gateway provides easy access to many (currently over 80) of the NIST scientific and technical databases (list of free databases). These databases cover a broad range of substances and properties from many different scientific disciplines.
Quick List (selected):
Nucleonica allows user-friendly access to the latest reference data from internationally evaluated nuclear data. A unique feature is the wide range of web-based nuclear science applications. Also provided is a variety of social networking tools for scientific collaboration.
Access to Nucleonica is based on individual usernames and passwords. Accounts for full premium access can be created individually. Users have then their «own» files within Nucleonica i.e. their own personal desktop, nuclide mixtures, graphics files, application configurations files etc.
Starting 2014, Nucleonica will be expanded by the Karlsruhe Nuclide Chart Online (KNCO) giving you latest experimental data for ground states and isomers, including decay schemes for selected nuclides. Existing users of Nucleonica are automatically upgraded to KNCO. New users should register for free access. Your accounts will then be upgraded such that you have premium access and additionally KNCO access.
Open databaseThe Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is the Department of Energy (DOE) office that collects, preserves, and disseminates DOE-sponsored research and development (R&D) results that are the outcomes of R&D projects or other funded activities at DOE labs and facilities nationwide and grantees at universities and other institutions. The information is typically in the form of technical documents, conference papers, articles, multimedia, and software, collectively referred to as scientific and technical information (STI).
A key resource for DOE program managers, contracting officers, and others involved in R&D-related work is SciTech Connect, which provides access to over 2.5 million research citations from 1943 forward, with full text of DOE STI available comprehensively since 1990 and selectively for earlier years. Other collections developed and maintained by OSTI include: DOE-affiliated scholarly articles in DOE PAGES, DOE scientific research data and non-text information in DOE Data Explorer, multimedia videos highlighting DOE’s scientific research in ScienceCinema, patents resulting from DOE-funded work in the DOepatents database and remarkable advances in science at DOE R&D Accomplishments.
Open databaseOxford Bibliographies provides acceess to articles from the subject Ecology.
Open databaseThe information system PANGAEA is operated as an Open Access library aimed at archiving, publishing and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research. The system guarantees long-term availability of its content through a commitment of the operating institutions.
Most of the data are freely available and can be used under the terms of the license mentioned on the data set description. A few password protected data sets are under moratorium from ongoing projects. The description of each data set is always visible and includes the principle investigator (PI) who may be asked for access.
Open databaseThe Pesticide Properties Database (PPDB) is a comprehensive relational database of pesticide physicochemical, toxicological, ecotoxicological and other related data. The database holds data for around 1,100 pesticides, 500 metabolites and 100 other related substances. It includes physicochemical (environmental fate), ecotoxicological and human health data, as well as information on approval status, EC Directive 91/414 status, chemical structure, classification, resistance properties, and branding/formulation information.
The data sources within the PPDB are referenced, and AERU have utilised a unique scoring system to express data confidence. Each item is given a score between 1 for low confidence (e.g. un-referenced figures) and 5 for high confidence (e.g. from EU product registration documentation). This ensures that users are fully aware of any limitations in the data, and can use it accordingly.
Supporting information including Questions and answers and instructions for use are available.
Open databaseThe Pharmacopoeia in Switzerland consists of the European Pharmacopoeia (Pharmacopoea Europaea, Ph.Eur.) and the Swiss Pharmacopoeia (Pharmacopoea Helvetica, Ph.Helv.). It contains quality regulations for common and known medicinal products and pharmaceutical excipients as well as for individual medical devices. The contained regulations are binding and have legal character.
Please note that online access to this database requires free registration.
Open databaseThe PSI Public Data Repository hosts the publicly available datasets produced at PSI. This is the public-facing version of SciCat.
Go to PSI Public Data RepositoryPubMed is a bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, molecular biology and other life sciences. The database covers articles from more than 30,000 journals and has over 37 million citations going back to 1966. Many PubMed citations contain links to full text articles which are freely available, either from the publisher or as part of NCBI's PubMed Central collection. It also provides access and links to the integrated molecular biology databases included in NCBI's Entrez retrieval system. These databases contain DNA and protein sequences, 3-D protein structure data, population study data sets and complete genomes.
Open databasere3data is a registry of research data repositories that is global and covers all the research disciplines.
Open databaseThe PSI metadata catalogue that works in conjunction with the PSI PetaByte archive. Access is granted to SciCat by the Digital User Office.
Open databaseThe CAS SciFinder Discovery Platform features SciFinder-n to access the content collection of the chemical abstract service (CAS), the integrated formulation database Formulus with curated information from patents and journals, and Analytical Methods for searching and comparing published scientific methods.
CAS SciFinder-n
A next generation scientific research solution providing access to a comprehensive collection of chemical reactions, substances, and scientific literature incl. patents curated by expert scientists. Special features allow users to search for information by drawing chemical structures or substructures, or by reaction, polymer and specific biosequence. Benefits to the (legacy) SciFinder classic include Boolean searching as well as reference and substance role filtering.
CAS Formulus
A comprehensive formulations database supporting formulators in developing products.
CAS Analytical Methods
Analyses make it simple to locate, compare, and understand analytical methods from top journals and patents.
Access to the CAS SciFinder Discovery Platform is provided through Single Sign-On. To log in, enter your email address followed by your SWITCHaai credentials. If you have any questions or need assistance, please reach out to @email.
Open databaseSDBS is an integrated spectral database system for organic compounds, which includes six different types of spectra under a directory of the compounds. The six spectra are as follows: an electron impact Mass spectrum (EI-MS), a Fourier transform infrared spectrum (FT-IR), a 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrum, a 13C NMR spectrum, a laser Raman spectrum, and an electron spin resonance (ESR) spectrum.
Open databaseTreesearch is a database of publications by scientists in the US Forest Service. Publications in the collection include research monographs published by the agency as well as papers written by USDA scientists but published by other organizations in their journals, conference proceedings, or books. There are currently more 35,000 publications in Treesearch, all of which can be downloaded in PDF format, making it the largest freely available collection of online forestry research in the world.
Treesearch lets you search listings by author, keyword, originating station or date. Keyword searches examine both the title and abstract.
Open databaseAccess to more than 8 million records covering all aspects of agriculture and related disciplines.
Search everything for results from the catalogue and articles database (AGRICOLA), PubAg, and the NAL Digital Collections (NALDC). Or choose to limit your search to:
FAQs
There is a number of issues you could encounter. Please try the following solutions:
Please contact us via @email, or call the library at 058 765 5700 if you encounter any problem with the access to databases.
Licensing agreements with electronic service providers restrict access to electronic resources, for which the library Lib4RI pays a subscription fee, to current members of Eawag, Empa, WSL and PSI. However, most licensing agreements permit visitors as so-called “walk-in users” on-site access to our electronic resources on publicly accessible library computers.
Access to licensed electronic resources (such as databases, e-journals or e-books) are governed by the conditions of use contained in licence agreements between the library Lib4RI and the respective publishers. These licences vary but have some common elements.
You are generally not allowed to:
If you are planning to use licensed electronic resources for a text data mining or an AI project, please contact us at @email and we will help you clarify the conditions.
Restrictions on using electronic resources from AIP
From AIP, the American Institute of Physics, we got a longer list of Terms of Use (which is, at least more liberal and allows for instance, the delivery to a colleague).