S.No Name of Data Base Description
Why/ Where to use it
1 Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database
launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377
titles from approximately 11,678 publishers, of
which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-
level subject fields: life sciences, social sciences,
physical sciences and health sciences. It covers
three types of sources: book series, journals, and
trade journals. All journals covered in the Scopus
database are reviewed for sufficiently high quality
each year according to four types of numerical
quality measure for each title; those are h-Index,
CiteScore, SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) and SNIP
(source normalized impact per paper). Scopus also
allows patent searches in a dedicated patent
database Lexis-Nexis, albeit with a limited
functionality.
2 Web of Science The Web of Science (WoS; previously known as
Web of Knowledge) is a paid-access platform that
provides (typically via the internet) access to
multiple databases that provide reference and
citation data from academic journals, conference
proceedings, and other documents in various
academic disciplines. Until 1997, it was originally
produced by the Institute for Scientific Information.
It is currently owned by Clarivate. Disciplines-
Science, social science, arts, humanities (supports
256 disciplines).
Temporal coverage- 1900–present
No. of records
79 million (core collection)
171 million (platform).
The Web of Science Core Collection consists of six
online indexing databases: SCIE, SSCI, AHCI,
ESCI, BCI, CPCI
3 PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily
the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts
Link
https://www.scopus.com/search/form.uri?
display=basic#basic
https://clarivate.com/products/scientific-
and-academic-research/research-
discovery-and-workflow-solutions/
webofscience-platform/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
How?
Scopus is a research database used to find
scholarly articles, track citations, and stay
updated on academic research. It's valuable for
researchers, universities, businesses, and
government agencies. Use it to search for
information, evaluate research impact, and set
up alerts to stay informed. Access it through
academic institutions or libraries.
Web of Science is described as a unifying
research tool that enables the user to acquire,
analyze, and disseminate database information
in a timely manner. This is accomplished
because of the creation of a common
vocabulary, called ontology, for varied search
terms and varied data. Moreover, search terms
generate related information across categories.
Web of Science employs various search and
analysis capabilities. First, citation indexing is
employed, which is enhanced by the capability
to search for results across disciplines. Second,
subtle trends and patterns relevant to the
literature or research of interest, become
apparent. Broad trends indicate significant
topics of the day, as well as the history relevant
to both the work at hand, and particular areas of
study. Third, trends can be graphically
represented.
PubMed is the number one resource for anyone
looking for literature in medicine or biological
 on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United
States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the
National Institutes of Health maintain the database
as part of the Entrez system of information
retrieval. From 1971 to 1997, online access to the
MEDLINE database had been primarily through
institutional facilities, such as university libraries.
The PubMed system was offered free to the public
starting in June 1997.
4 DOAJ: Directory Database of open access journals covering all
of Open Access scientific and scholarly subjects. Primarily used to
Journal identify open access journal titles and forty percent
of them are searchable at the article level. To be
included in the DOAJ, journals must use a funding
model that does not charge readers or their
institutions for access and must exercise peer-
review or editorial quality control.
5 JSTOR JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million
journal articles, books, images, and primary sources
in 75 disciplines. It helps to explore a wide range of
scholarly content through a powerful research and
teaching platform. They collaborate with the
academic community to help libraries connect
students and faculty to vital content while lowering
costs and increasing shelf space, provide
independent researchers with free and low-cost
access to scholarship, and help publishers reach
new audiences and preserve their content for future
generations.
6 ScienceDirect ScienceDirect is a website that provides access to a
large bibliographic database of scientific and
medical publications of the Elsevier. It hosts over
18 million pieces of content from more than 4,000
academic journals and 30,000 e-books of this
publisher. The access to the full-text requires
subscription, while the bibliographic metadata is
free to read. ScienceDirect is operated by Elsevier.
It was launched in March 1997.
7 ERIC For education sciences, ERIC is the number one
https://www.library.ucsb.edu/node/2350
https://www.jstor.org/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/
https://eric.ed.gov/
sciences. PubMed stores abstracts and
bibliographic details of more than 30 million
papers and provides full text links to the
publisher sites or links to the free PDF on
PubMed Central (PMC).
The DOAJ is an open-access academic database
that can be accessed and searched for free.
Journals can be browsed by title or by broad
subject area. Articles are searchable by article
author or title, ISSN, journal title, abstract, or
key words. Full-text is not searchable but is
fully accessible.
JSTOR is another great resource to find
research papers. Any article published before
1924 in the United States is available for free.
Most common for research in humanities fields.
The journals are grouped into four main
sections: Physical Sciences and Engineering,
Life Sciences, Health Sciences, Social Sciences
and Humanities. Article abstracts are freely
available, and access to their full texts (in PDF
and, for newer publications, also HTML)
generally requires a subscription or pay-
perview purchase unless the content is freely
available in open access.
ERIC is a comprehensive, easy-to-use,
 destination. ERIC stands for Education Resources searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and
Information Center, and is a database that full-text database of education research and
specifically hosts education-related literature.It is information. ERIC has five main user groups:
sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences academics, researchers, educators,
within the U.S. Department of Education. policymakers, and the general public.
Coverage: approx. 1.6 million items. Access
options: free. Provider: U.S. Department of
Education
8 IEEE Xplore IEEE Xplore is the leading academic database in https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/ IEEE Xplore is the leading academic database
the field of engineering and computer science. It's home.jsp in the field of engineering and computer
not only journal articles, but also conference science. It's not only journal articles, but also
papers, standards and books that can be search for. conference papers, standards and books that can
Coverage: approx. 6 million items. Access options: be search for.
free. Provider: IEEE (Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers)
9 arXiv arXiv is a free distribution service and an open- https://arxiv.org/ Scholarly articles in the fields of physics,
access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly mathematics, computer science, quantitative
articles. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed biology, quantitative finance, statistics,
by arXiv. electrical engineering and systems science, and
economics.
10 Project Muse Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between https://muse.jhu.edu/ Most common for research in humanities
libraries and publishers, is an online database of fields.
peer reviewed academic journals and electronic
books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities
and social science content from over 250 university
presses and scholarly societies around the world. It
is an aggregator of digital versions of academic
journals, all of which are free of digital rights
management (DRM). It operates as a third-party
acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR,
OverDrive, and ProQuest. MUSE's online journal
collections are available on a subscription basis to
academic, public, special, and school libraries.
Currently, more than 2,500 libraries worldwide
subscribe. Electronic book collections became
available for institutional purchase in January 2012.
Thousands of scholarly books are available on the
platform.
11 PhilPapers PhilPapers is an interactive academic database of https://philpapers.org/ Index journals, books, open access archives,
 journal articles in philosophy. It is maintained by and personal pages maintained by academics
the Centre for Digital Philosophy at the University
of Western Ontario, and as of 2022, it has 394,867
registered users, including the majority of
professional philosophers and graduate students.
They monitor all sources of research content in
philosophy, including journals, books, and open
access archives. They also host the largest open
access archive in philosophy. Their index currently
contains 2,812,231 entries categorized in 5,858
categories.
12 PsycINFO PsycINFO is a database of abstracts of literature in https://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/ Social sciences databases. PsycINFO contains
the field of psychology. It is produced by the psycinfo/index citations and summaries from the 19th century
American Psychological Association and to the present of journal articles, book chapters,
distributed on the association's APA PsycNET and books, and dissertations.
through third-party vendors. It is the electronic
version of the now-ceased Psychological Abstracts.
In 2000, it absorbed PsycLIT which had been
published on CD-ROM.
13 CiteSeerX CiteSeerX (formerly called CiteSeer) is a public https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ CiteSeer freely provided Open Archives
search engine and digital library for scientific and metadata of all indexed documents and links
academic papers, primarily in the fields of indexed documents when possible to other
computer and information science. CiteSeer's goal sources of metadata such as DBLP and the
is to improve the dissemination and access of ACM Portal.
academic and scientific literature. As a non-profit
service that can be freely used by anyone, it has
been considered as part of the open access
movement that is attempting to change academic
and scientific publishing to allow greater access to
scientific literature.
14 Semantic Scholar Semantic Scholar is a research tool powered by https://www.semanticscholar.org/ Mostly computer science and biomedical
artificial intelligence for scientific literature. It was publications.
developed at the Allen Institute for AI and publicly
released in November 2015. It uses advances in
natural language processing to provide summaries
for scholarly papers. The Semantic Scholar team is
actively researching the use of artificial intelligence
in natural language processing, machine learning,
human–computer interaction, and information
 retrieval. Semantic Scholar began as a database for
the topics of computer science, geoscience, and
neuroscience. In 2017, the system began including
biomedical literature in its corpus. As of September
2022, it includes over 200 million publications
from all fields of science.
15 Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search https://scholar.google.com/ Google Scholar is a freely accessible web
engine that indexes the full text or metadata of search engine that indexes the full text or
scholarly literature across an array of publishing metadata of scholarly literature across an array
formats and disciplines. Released in beta in of publishing formats and disciplines.
November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes
peer reviewed online academic journals and books,
conference papers, theses and dissertations,
preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other
scholarly literature, including court opinions and
patents. An earlier statistical estimate published in
PLOS One estimated approximately 79–90%
coverage of all articles published in English with an
estimate of 100 million.