Library Guides: WORKSHOP: Undergraduate Research: Resources for Lit Review

Select Library Databases

Below are just a few databases that might be useful for your search. You can identify more by exploring the Subject Guide related to your research topic.

LionSearch
an integrated search of books, e-books, research articles, newspaper articles, and other publications.
Academic Search Complete (Ebsco)
a great multi-discipline database that contains over 5,000 full text peer-reviewed journals.
Academic Search Complete is a comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format.
ProQuest (Multiple Databases)
Another multi-discipline database that contains the full text of over 2,000 journals
Searches multiple ProQuest products, indexing 5,000+ magazines, journals, and newspapers. Keywords: news, New York Times, current events, contemporary issues, hot topics, English 15, CAS 100.
Web of Science
Indexes articles and citations from thousands of journals, allows researchers to ID core papers and authors in a particular subject area.
Web of Science provides access to: the Science Citation Index Expanded 1900-present; the Social Sciences Citation Index 1956-present; and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index 1975-present. Web of Science indexes articles from thousands of journals and also indexes the citations used in those articles, thus allowing the user to see which papers have cited a core paper, and how many times a paper was cited in a given time period. Covers published content is almost every discipline.
Google Scholar
Use the Google search algorithm to search specifically for peer-reviewed and other scholarly resources.
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Once you set your institutional preferences, links to full-text, if available at Penn State, should appear.
American Chemical Society Publications
Provides full text access to American Chemical Society publications.
Provides full text access to American Chemical Society publications. We are not able to access C&EN Online here, but do get it from 1998 - present as Chemical & Engineering News/ACS Single Titles Subscriptions.
Biological Abstracts
Biological Abstracts is the premier database for the biological sciences
Biological Abstracts is the premier database for the biological sciences. BA monitors more than 5,000 international journals to ensure that virtually every life science topic is covered, including agriculture, biochemistry, biology, botany, molecular biology, biotechnology, physiology, microbiology, neurology, pharmacology, public health, toxicology, zoology, and ecology and the environment. Coverage is from 1926 to date.
Criminal Justice Abstracts
Provides abstracts of articles from the major journals in criminology and related disciplines. Full text of many is available through other library resources
Provides abstracts of articles from the major journals in criminology and related disciplines, as well as books and reports from government and nongovernmental agencies. For each document, an informative summary of the findings, methodology, and conclusions is provided. Topics include crime trends, prevention projects, corrections, juvenile delinquency, police, courts, offenders, victims, and sentencing.
Environmental Sciences Collection
The Environmental Sciences Collection provides abstracts and references to the environment literature
The Environmental Sciences Collection provides abstracts and references to the environment literature covering all areas of air, land, water, and noise pollution as well as bacteriology, ecology, toxicology, risk assessment, environmental engineering, environmental biotechnology, waste management, and water resources from 1967 to the present.
PsycArticles (via ProQuest)
PsycARTICLES is a database of full-text articles from journals published by the American Psychological Association, the APA Educational Publishing Foundation, the Canadian Psychological Association, and Hogrefe & Huber.
PsycARTICLES is a database of full-text articles from journals published by the American Psychological Association, the APA Educational Publishing Foundation, the Canadian Psychological Association, and Hogrefe & Huber.
ScienceDirect (Elsevier full text journal articles and electronic books)
Provides access to 1,2000 journals from Elsevier covering a variety of scientific fields.
This system provides access to the electronic versions of the Elsevier journals and books that we subscribe to. Current issues and back files are included. Currently, it includes more than 1,200 journals. The full text collection contains over 1.5 million articles and book chapters from 1995 to present across all fields of science.
SciFinder-n
SciFinder-n indexes the chemical literature as well as providing searchable information regarding specific chemical substances, reactions, structure and substructure searching, chemical supplier information, and a retrosynthesis planner.
SciFinder-n indexes the chemical literature as well as providing searchable information regarding specific chemical substances, reactions, structure and substructure searching, chemical supplier information, and a retrosynthesis planner.

Finding the Full Text of Articles

Sometimes, the full text of an article won't be available in the database where you find it. Here are some strategies for locating the Full text.

1. Use the Get It! Penn State Button

This button is a short cut that allows you to quickly search through our other databases to find the full text.

2. Search Yourself Using Lion Search

Lion Search is the catch-all search that allows you to search all our resources at once. Search for the article's title to see if we have the full text in our collection - make sure you put it in quotes!

3. Request an Interlibrary Loan

If the "Get It!" button and Lion Search don't come up with the full text - you will see an option to request the full text via Interlibrary Loan. Once you fill out the request, it may take a few days for us to get the full text from another library - you will be notified by your PSU email how to access the full text once it arrives.