Very Short IntroductionsVery Short Introductions are published by Oxford University Press and offer concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects. This collection includes over 600 e-books on topics in arts and humanities, history, law, literature, medicine and health, religion, science and mathematics, and social sciences.
Oxford Reference Online: PremiumAccess to more than 170 full-text Oxford dictionaries and reference works. There are over 1.5 million dictionary definitions with the dictionary updated continuously.
Gale eBooksA database of encyclopedias, reference sources, and full-text eBooks that cover multiple disciplines.
StatistaStatista consolidates statistical data on over 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources. It includes insights and facts across 600 industries and 50+ countries.
Consider adding terms like "literature review" OR "review of the literature" OR "review of literature" OR "systematic review"
ScopusScopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Delivering a comprehensive overview of the world's research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities, Scopus features smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research.
To learn more about logging into Scopus, see this guide.
Use the "Review article" filter under Document Type to find articles that summarize the current state of understanding on a topic
SciValQuick and easy access to the research performance of 8500 research institutions and 220 countries worldwide. SciVal requires a one-time registration from on campus.
Academic Search PremierThis multi-disciplinary database offers full text for nearly 2,000 scholarly journals, including more than 1,500 peer-reviewed titles. Covering virtually every area of academic study, Academic Search Premier offers full text information dating as far back as 1985. This database is updated on a daily basis.
ProQuest Research LibraryProQuest Research Library provides one-stop access to thousands of full-text periodicals from one of the broadest, most inclusive general reference databases ProQuest has to offer. Search from a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, professional and trade publications, and magazines covering over 150 subjects and topics.
JSTORFull-text access for over 17 million journal articles, books, documents, and research reports in a variety of disciplines.
CompendexCompendex has over 27.5 million records from 85 countries across 190 engineering disciplines. There is also a comprehensive, historical view of engineering innovations between 1884-1969 in the Engineering Index Backfile.
To learn more about searching in Compendex, see this guide.
Free multi-disciplinary search databases
Google ScholarWith an OSU login, the Google Scholar interface allows users to search library holdings and peer-reviewed articles.
Research RabbitA citation-based literature mapping tool, allowing you to add papers and discover other papers related to it
PubMedMore than 34 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and eBooks, with some full-text linked.
Lens.orgSearch, analyze and manage free and open Patent and Scholarly Data. Patents include full text for U.S. granted patents (1976-present) and applications (2001-present), EPA granted patents (1980-present), WIPO PCT applications (1978-present). Scholarly search serves over 200 million open access scholarly records, compiled and harmonized from Microsoft Academic, PubMed and Crossref, enhanced with OpenAlex and UnPaywall open access information, CORE full text and links to ORCID. Includes filtering, data visualization and export options.
Semantic ScholarSemantic Scholar provides free, AI-driven search and discovery tools, and open resources for the global research community. Indexes over 200 million academic papers sourced from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawls.
OpenAlexThe OpenAlex dataset describes scholarly entities and how those entities are connected to each other. There are five types of entities: works, authors, venues, institutions, and concepts.
Together, these make a huge web (or more technically, heterogeneous directed graph) of hundreds of millions of entities and billions of connections between them all.
Open Knowledge MapsUses text similarity to create "knowledge maps" or topical overviews based on relevant documents matching your query.
Connected PapersUses the Semantic Scholar database to create a graph of similar papers (based on patterns of overlapping citations and references) as well as identifies key prior and derivative works for that particular body of works.
Citation Gecko (not actively maintained)Start from a small set of 'seed papers' that define an area you are interested. Gecko will search the citation network for connected papers allowing you to quickly identify important papers you may have missed.
IncitefulThe goal of Inciteful is to give the world free tools to help accelerate academic research. If that means getting up to speed on a new topic, finding the latest literature, or figuring out how two ideas are connected, we can help.
Unlike a traditional search engine, citations are the cornerstone of all of our tools. Building these tools for all academic literature has only recently been possible with the rise of open scholarly bibliographic data and the amazing work being done by the these groups.
To date we have two tools. Paper Discovery and the Literature Connector. More tools are actively under development.
The Paper Discovery tool builds a network of papers from citations, uses network analysis algorithms to analyze the network, and gives you the information you need to quickly get up to speed on that topic. You can find the most similar papers, important papers as well as prolific authors and institutions.
ElicitElicit is a research assistant using language models like GPT-3 to automate parts of researchers’ workflows. Currently, the main workflow in Elicit is Literature Review. If you ask a question, Elicit will show relevant papers and summaries of key information about those papers in an easy-to-use table.
PerplexityPerplexity is your AI research assistant. It has a conversational interface, contextual awareness and personalization to learn your interests and preferences over time. Perplexity is your AI research assistant. It has a conversational interface, contextual awareness and personalization to learn your interests and preferences over time.
Litmaps (free account required)From a single paper, Litmaps generates a map of the most relevant articles that relate to your seed paper. The most recent articles appear on the right, the most cited articles appear at the top and the lines show the citations in-between.
Click on the dots to explore the articles, add new terms to expand your search and let Litmaps find the articles you didn’t know you needed to know about. Once you’re happy, save your new collection as a Litmap and share it.
Zotero ConnectorAllow you to save to Zotero directly from your web browser.
ZoteroBibTo create a citation automatically from an ISBN, DOI or a form, try a citation manager like ZoteroBib. Click Help in the upper right corner for instructions.
Browser Plugins
UnpaywallDownload the Unpaywall browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. When you view a research article, Unpaywall automatically looks for a copy in its index of 20 million free, legal full-text PDFs. If it finds one, you can click the green tab to read the open version.
Open Access ButtonFree, legal research articles delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors.
