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Physics 399 : Physics Resources for Thesis Writers (HC)
ENCYCLOPEDIA:
AccessScience @ McGraw-Hill
Full-text access to 7100+ articles, 115,000 dictionary terms, and hundreds of Research Updates in all areas of science and technology updated daily.
Excellent for broad topic searches such as Statistical Mechanics. Numerous equations and linked articles. Check out the "For further study" link and dictionary entries.
Excellent for broad topic searches such as Statistical Mechanics. Numerous equations and linked articles. Check out the "For further study" link and dictionary entries.
Encyclopedia of astronomy and astrophysics
Provides full text for over 2,700 frequently updated articles in astronomy and astrophysics.
Eric Weisstein's Physics Encyclopedia
Part of Eric Weisstein's World of Science, in addition to basic information on physics topics, this contains biographies of scientists, including physicists and astronomers.
BOOKS:
Google Books
Fulltext search of millions of books digitized by Google Books. You can read the context in a snippet and then find out if you have this book from your library.
Worldcat.org
Publicly available version of Worldcat, a catalog of the holdings of books, journals, and other materials held by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) member libraries. Includes manuscripts, maps, films and sound recordings. Covers works published before 1,000 BC-present.
DATABASES:
ArXiv.org e-print archive
Provides an electronic archive of research papers in full-text for physics and related disciplines, including mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology. Covers 1991-present.
High Energy Physics Database (HEP)
From the official description of the site: "Search more than 500,000 high-energy physics related articles, including journal papers, preprints, e-prints, technical reports, conference papers and theses, comprehensively indexed by the SLAC and DESY libraries since 1974." "The SPIRES-HEP database has been run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center(SLAC) since the late 1960's as a database of particle physics literature."
NASA astrophysics data system
A NASA-funded project that provides abstracts and/or citations to journals in fields that includes: astronomy, astrophysics, science education and astronomy people database containing over 7 million records as of November 2008, instrumentation, physics, geophysics, and all preprint server articles. Fulltext links to journal websites, cited references, citing references, also-read's and export options for use with many bibliographic management tools.
Web of science
Provider: ISI
Provides access to the Social Sciences Citation Index, Science Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index. Search for scholarly articles in any discipline, or for articles that cite a known author or work. Coverage varies.
INSPEC
Provides abstracts to journals, conference proceedings, standards and reports in the physical sciences, materials science, electrical engineering, telecommunications and computer science. Covers 1969-present.
See user guide for details on the database and how to search it well.
See user guide for details on the database and how to search it well.
ProQuest Research Library
Provider: ProQuest
Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines, both scholarly and popular in scope. Covers 1971-present.
JOURNAL COLLECTIONS:
PROLA : Physical review online archive
Contains nearly complete electronic copies of Physical review journals from 1985 through 1996. Will eventually go back to the first volume of Physical review published in 1893.
SPIN Web
Provider: AIP
This American Institute of Physics-sponsored site (called Scitation) provides an interface for the SPIN (Searchable Physics Information Notices) database. This allows for searching and browsing of articles from major physics, astronomy, and engineering journals. Also includes conference proceedings, preprints, and even MedLine as one of the searchable collections. Covers 1975-present, plus full access to
Scitation publications contain forward links to articles that cite it, links to related articles, errata, editorials commentaries and author-supplied supplementary material which can include multimedia.
IOPScience
IOPscience from the Institute of Physics, includes ALL IOP published content back to 1874. Also included are 6 journals published by Turpion, a publisher that covers the Russian physics literature in translation. The fields covered include physics, mathematics, engineering, chemistry and biology. A useful journal collection with worldwide coverage of the literature. Document types retrieved include journal articles, eprints (advanced online and arXiv articles) and news & events.
ScienceDirect
Provides full-text,online access to journal articles in the life, physical, medical, technical, and social sciences. Full-text is available only for journals to which the TriColleges subscribe. Full-text access for most journals goes back to 1993. Abstracts are available for non-subscribed journals. Search in selected subject categories for more precise answers.
Nature
Holdings:
(Bryn Mawr College) Available from 1990-present.
(Haverford College) Available from 1869-1949, 1990-present.
(Swarthmore College) Available from 1990-present.
Publisher: [London] : Nature Pub. Group.
Short research articles called Letters which describe original research are placed in context by accompanying Editor's Summary and News & Views capsules. These summaries help to place the research articles in context of the broader field.
Science Online
List of science-related magazines and other online resources. Browse table of contents for special articles with an attendant Perspectives article which provides very useful context in which to place the research.
Virtual Journals Collection from AIP and APS
AIP and APS jointly compile weekly relevant papers in these areas:
- Superconductivity
- Biological Physics
- Nanoscale Science and Technology
- Quantum Information
- Ultrafast science
SPECIALTY SEARCH ENGINES:
Google Scholar
Google Scholar has convinced many publishers to allow their robots to index their sites. As a result, many articles can be found and are ranked by the prominence of the author's and journal's previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on. Look for the new link on the upper right for "Recent articles" -- or switch to "All articles" for the full list. Click on "Group of n" to find alternate ways to get full text.
More project info and search tips are available .
More project info and search tips are available .
Scirus
Scirus searches over 200 million science-specific web pages including academic, publishers and scientific and professional society websites and their publications databases. If an answer is found and to be available through ScienceDirect (an Elsevier product) and if we have a subscription, we can see the full text of the item. You can find out which publishers are now available for searching. Helpful suggestions of alternate keywords are offered!
CURRENT AWARENESS - staying up-to-date:
Physics today
Holdings:
(Bryn Mawr College) Available from 1948-present.
(Haverford College) Available from 1948-present.
(Swarthmore College) Available from 1948-present.
Publisher: [College Park, Md.] : American Institute of Physics.
PhysicsWorld
This online offering from IOP covers everything from the latest developments worldwide in basic research to technology and industrial applications.
Physics- Spotlighting exceptional research
Each week, this new online journal showcases newly published in Physical Review and Physical Review Letters. Three types of monthly articles appear and their corresponding description from the official site follow:
"...Brief commentaries called Viewpoints that spotlight papers selected by the editors of the Physical Review on the basis of interest and importance."
"Longer articles called Trends will appear roughly every month to highlight a larger body of work that spans the past few years, and indicate what researchers in that field see as the key challenges and interesting questions."
"Shorter staff-written summaries called Synopses will cover interesting papers selected by the editors of all the Physical Review journals."
"...Brief commentaries called Viewpoints that spotlight papers selected by the editors of the Physical Review on the basis of interest and importance."
"Longer articles called Trends will appear roughly every month to highlight a larger body of work that spans the past few years, and indicate what researchers in that field see as the key challenges and interesting questions."
"Shorter staff-written summaries called Synopses will cover interesting papers selected by the editors of all the Physical Review journals."
Science Daily
Daily science news gathered from government, academic and industrial sectors. Archives can be searched, returns related articles and videos.
CITATION & PRESENTATION GUIDES:
Effective Presentation Website
How to prepare a seminar talk
The craft of scientific presentations
Publisher: New York : Springer, c2003.
"What distinguishes this book on scientific presentations is that it anchors all its advice in the experiences of scientists and engineers, including such successful presenters as Richard Feynman, Heinrich Hertz, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Linus Pauling as well as currently active laboratory directors, scientists, and engineers."--BOOK JACKET.
BIBIOGRAPHIC MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE:
Endnote Web
Save your references in a web-accessible server and write your paper on different computers and output the bibliography in various styles. Microsoft Word Plugin called Cite While U Write is a useful tool to automate in-text citations and keep track of works cited in perfect order.
Zotero
Great tool for capturing website link and snapshot as you found it. Keep your fulltext articles linked to your references with room for notes. Especially useful if you use the same computer to do your work. A word-processor plug in is now in beta-testing for Word and Google Docs.