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University Library

Research Skills

The following information is intended to help Physics students locate academic literature and sources for their research. It is by no means an exhaustive list. Please refer to the Library Catalogue if you looking for a particular book or journal title, or contact the Physics Liaison Librarian Richard Holmes for any specific advice.  

Defining and Refining a Research Topic

Encyclopaedias provide short overviews of a topic, theory, idea, concept or a person's work.  Dictionaries provide short definition of a scholarly term, concept or word. They can be a good starting point for an overview of a topic and refining it further. 

Some useful reference resources for Physics are:

Finding journal articles

Online databases search for journal articles. This enables you to search for information on subjects when you don't know which book or journal you need. Some useful databases for Physics are:

  • IoP electronic journals: Provides access to all the Institute of Physics electronic journals subscribed to. Now includes access to the Institute of Physics electronic journal archive covering IOP journals between 1874 and 1998.
  • ACM digital library: Provides bibliographic information, abstracts, reviews, and the full-text for articles published in the Association for Computing Machinery periodicals and proceedings since 1985.
  • Web of Knowledge: Contains several databases (including the Web of Science) and has wide ranging subject coverage, providing access to articles published in over 10,000 journals. The referencing software EndNote Web is available here. 
  • Science Direct: Database for scientific research.
  • Google Scholar: Freely available scholarly search engine. You can configure Google Scholar to show The 'Durham ConneXions' button off-campus, and this is automatically shown on campus. You can use 'Durham ConneXions' to check if the Library has the article available.

The library has produced a variety of tutorials to help search some of the different databases.

E-books

E-books allow you to search within the contents of the book, unlike the library catalogue which just searches for book titles.

Newspapers and Magazines

  • Info Trac - A searchable collection of full text newspapers including the Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, The Guardian and The Independent.
  • New Scientist 
  • Nature

Research Repositories and Conference Proceedings

  • The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 8.6 million records: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and arXiv e-prints.
  • INSPIRE database for researchers in particle physics, interacts closely with HEP publishers, arXiv.org, NASA-ADS, PDG, and other information resources.
  • arXiv.org e-Print archive - up to date e-print service which presents the latest papers in physics and related disciplines, mathematics, nonlinear science, computer science, and quantitative biology.
  • Astronomical Society of the Pacific: Conference series provides full text of papers in the conference series, starting from 2004.

Internet Resources

  • Physics.org The public interface of the Institute of Physics.
  • Scirus is a search engine for top quality scientific web content, including patent information, technical reports from NASA, e-prints from CogPrints and E-Prints ArXiv, and RePEc. It also adds valuable content found in Institutional Repositories.

Evaluation of Resources

The Critical Thinking Exercise from Teesside University can help critical evaluation of information sources.

Citations and Referencing

EndNote is a useful tool which can help you manage your references, import a bibliography into your assignment and allow you to insert citations.