Catalogs and Indexing Databases: An Overview

The basic principle underlying the organization of any library is to describe the documents it contains so that they may be located. All libraries create sets of records which describe the documents in their collections. Catalogs are sets of records to documents that share a location. Indexes are sets of records to documents that share some other attribute (generally subject matter). Corpora are collections of text. Catalogs, indexes, and corpora are created and/or maintained by various authorities (state or private, non-profit or commercial). Here you will find the most significant and representative catalogs, indexes, and corpora across major disciplines.

Major Subject Indexes - Government

Published by the National Agricultural Library, the Agricola database describes publications and resources encompassing all aspects of agriculture and allied disciplines including: animal science; veterinary science; entomology; plant science; forestry; aquaculture and fisheries; farming, farming systems and crops; agricultural economics; extension and education; food and human nutrition; and earth sciences and environmental sciences. The Bibliography of Agriculture is the print index to the agricultural literature going back to 1942 located on the Shields Library, Third Floor, at call number Z 5071 .U63. NOTE: default UCD Search Type set to Advanced Ovid Search. IMPORTANT: The largest and most comprehensive agricultural literature database is CAB Abstracts.
[Coverage: 1970-present]

Provides citations and abstracts to the international agricultural literature, including veterinary medicine, human and animal nutrition, forestry, rural development, as well as other related topics such as tourism and human ecology. Covers over 11,000 journals and conference proceedings and selected books in agriculture. Produced by CAB (Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux) International (CABI) with more than 10 million records. HISTORICAL SCOPE: Archive abstracts added in August 2005 go back to 1910 with 1,860,000 additional records. CAB DATABASE PDFs: As of January 2009, hard-to-find literature may be available as CAB Database PDFs (so noted below the UC-eLinks button). These CABI Full Text items give users automatic access to over 350,000 journal articles, conference papers and reports 80 percent of which are not available electronically anywhere else. NOTE: the default UCD Search Type is set to Advanced Ovid Search.
[Coverage: 1910-present]

The ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) database is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to provide extensive access to educational-related literature. ERIC provides ready access to education literature to augment American education by increasing and facilitating the use of educational research and information to improve practice in learning, teaching, educational decision-making, and research. ERIC provides coverage of journal articles, conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books and monographs.
[Coverage: 1966-present]

The Government Printing Office provides free online access to official U.S. Federal government documents and information. GPO is the recognized authoritative source for government information and has authenticated the documents on govinfo. Search for official versions of government documents and publications, browse by title, collection, congressional committee, date, and download publications.

Government-sponsored research, development and technical reports with full-text access to digitized reports published by the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), Department of Commerce. Search more than 3 million reports with links to over 800,000 full-text reports.
[Coverage: 1964-present]

PubMed for UC Davis offers users vastly more full-text articles than does the public version of Pubmed.gov. Search results in the UCD version display "Get it at UC" buttons providing (with on-campus or VPN connection) access to articles in journals licensed by UC Davis or enabling patrons to request articles that are not immediately available online. PubMed comprises over 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources. PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
[Coverage: 1902-present]

TRID includes over 900,000 records covering transportation research from ITRD and TRIS. It includes TRB publications going back to 1923, including Highway Research Board, SHRP, and Marine Board publications. Also indexed are Environmental Impact Statements, theses, reports, and research in progress. TRID is the world’s largest and most comprehensive bibliographic resource on transportation research information, covering all modes and disciplines of transportation.
[Coverage: 1920's-present]

Major Subject Indexes - Scholarly Societies

APA PsycInfo is published by the American Psychological Associations and provides comprehensive indexing and abstracts of the international psychological literature from the 1800s to the present. Documents indexed include journals, articles, books, dissertations and more. 90% of the 3,000+ titles indexed in APA PsycInfo are peer-reviewed.
[Coverage: 1840-present]

A comprehensive, indexed bibliography with selected abstracts of the world's economic literature compiled from the American Economic Association's Journal of economic literature and the Index of economic articles in journals and collective volumes. Topics include economic theory and history, monetary theory and financial institutions; labor economics; international, regional, urban economics; and other related subjects.
[Coverage: 1969-present]

The Modern Language Association International Bibliography (MLAIB) covers international scholarly materials on all languages, literatures, linguistics, and folklore from around the world. It includes citations to items from journals, series, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. MLAIB does not index book reviews.
[Coverage: 1926-present]

Major Subject Indexes - Commercial Publishers

BIOSIS Previews is a database for researching the biological sciences literature. Designed by biologists for keeping up with the literature across pure and applied life sciences including agriculture and medicine. Excellent features for searching by taxonomic categories and broad concept codes (subject categories). More than 27 million records in all life science areas, including agriculture, biochemistry, biomedicine, biotechnology, ecology, environmental biology, genetics, microbiology, plant biology, veterinary medicine & pharmacology, and zoology. Indexes over 6,000 journals, serials, books and book chapters, conference proceedings and patents.
[Coverage: 1926-present]

FSTA (Food Science and Technology Abstracts) is an extensive specialist database covering scientific and technological literature relating to food, beverages and nutrition. Carefully selected food and health research and information is collated, summarized, and indexed for efficient searching. It is managed by a team of expert scientists within IFIS, a not-for-profit organization with an ongoing commitment to learning and development and a reputation for scientific integrity, accuracy and excellence. FSTA covers topics relating to aspects of the food chain including all the major food commodities plus biotechnology, microbiology, food safety, additives, nutrition, packaging and pet foods. It's used by researchers, industry practitioners, and students around the world to keep up-to-date with the latest findings in their fields. FSTA offers in excess of 1,200,000 highly informative summaries of research articles, patents, standards, reviews, conference proceedings and reports, and is used by academics and professionals throughout the world. IMPORTANT: default UCD Search Type is set to Advanced Ovid Search.
[Coverage: 1969-present]

FSTA Help on Ovid (database field guide, Ovid Quick Reference Guide, Ovid online training)

IFIS LibGuide: Good review practice (focus on systematic review methodology in the sciences of food and health)

Inspec was created by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and is one of the world's most definitive bibliographic scientific engineering research databases, containing over 15 million abstracts and indexing records. Inspec is on the Engineering Village platform and can be searched together with Ei Compendex. By searching both engineering research databases together, engineers gain access to the broadest engineering source available with a single database search experience.
[Coverage: 1898-present]

You must (register for a SciFinder account) before you can use the database (connect to the VPN to access registration page from off-campus).

SciFinder is the most comprehensive bibliographic database for scholarly research in the field of chemistry. It contains over 52 million citations and indexes over 50,000 journals, covering all aspects of chemistry, including chemical aspects of: biology and life sciences, engineering and materials science, food science, geology, medicine, physics, and polymer science. SciFinder also allows searching of chemical substances, chemical reactions, and includes some property data and spectra. It is the online version of Chemical Abstracts.
[Coverage: 1907-present, with selected pre-1907 material]
[Cited Reference Searching: 1996 - present, allows you to identify who is citing an article]

NOTE: Commercial use of your University account is strictly prohibited. SciFinder can only be used by UC students, faculty and staff.

Sociological Abstracts, and its companion file Social Services Abstracts, cover the international literature of sociology, social work, and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. It provides abstracting and indexing of articles and book reviews drawn from thousands of serials publications, plus books, book chapters, dissertations, conference papers, and working papers.
[Coverage: 1952-present]

Library Union Catalogs

OCLC catalog of millions of records for books, journal titles and materials in other formats from approximately 12,000 libraries worldwide.
[Coverage: 1000 A.D.-present]

Der KVK ist eine Meta-Suchmaschine zum Nachweis von mehreren hundert Millionen Büchern, Zeitschriften und anderen Medien in Bibliotheks- und Buchhandelskatalogen weltweit. The Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog is a meta-search engine for locating hundreds of millions of books, periodicals, and other media in library and book trade catalogues throughout the world.

Library Hub Discover contains nearly 50 million bibliographic records contributed by nearly 200 institutions in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Citation Indexes And Periodical Directories

Web of Science Core Collection enables searching of top-cited peer-reviewed content across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities with "cited reference" search capabilities. "It is a curated collection of over 20,000 peer-reviewed, high-quality scholarly journals published worldwide (including Open Access journals) in over 250 science, social sciences, and humanities disciplines. Conference proceedings and book data are also available." There is also access to Journal Citation Reports which provide impact metrics like the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Eigenfactor Scoring. Web of Science also has article, author and institutional citation indices. Includes EndNote Basic online citation management tool.
[Coverage: 1900-present]

Journal Citation Reports is an annual publication which indicates the most frequently cited journals in a field, the highest impact journals in a field, and the largest journals in a field. JCR Science/Social Sciences Edition contains data from over 7,200 journals in science, technology. JCR Social Sciences Edition contains data from over 2,200 journals in the social sciences. For each yearly data analysis being completed in the following year. The most recent edition is always published in the summer following the year analyzed. NOTE: For disciplines that have longer time-spans for citation, consider a ranking sort by using the 5-year Impact Factor.

The standard source for information on virtually every active and ceased periodical, annual, irregular publication, and monographic series published throughout the world (plus thousands of newspapers). Indicates whether a publication is a refereed (peer-reviewed) title.

NOTE: search by journal title, NOT article title. Ulrich's provides information on the entire publication (journal, magazine, newspaper, annual review) NOT on the articles within.

Full-Text Corpora

A repository of scanned books contributed from academic institutions across the United States, including UC campuses, and those digitized by Google and the Internet Archive. Books still in copyright are scanned and searchable, but the full text scans will not become available online until their copyright expires. Although there is significant overlap with Google books, this site has a much more effective and sophisticated search interface. For additional details, see the HathiTrust Help Page.

Archive of scholarly journals and ebooks in over 50 disciplines spanning the arts, humanities, social sciences and the sciences. For journals, coverage begins with volume one of each title and continues to within 3 to 5 years of the most current issue, with some up-to-date dependent on the title. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization established with the assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. It includes large online collections of moving images, music and audio recordings.

Indexes citations and provides linked page images of works represented in the microfilm series Early English Books I and II, based on The Short-Title Catalogue (Pollard and Redgrave, 1475-1640); the Short-Title Catalog II (Wing, 1641-1700), The Thomson Tracts (1640-1661), and The Early English Books Tracts Supplements.
[Coverage: 1450-1700]

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) provides full-text searchable access to the digital images of 150,000 books and other materials published during the 18th Century. Based on the English Short Title Catalog bibliography, it includes English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
[Coverage: 1701-1800]

Searchable database of citations and digitized images of the pages of more than 1100 American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century.
[Coverage: 1741-1940s]

Companion resource to Periodicals Index Online (PIO), PAO is a fulltext archive of hundreds of historical digitized journals published in the arts, humanities and social sciences;
[Coverage: 1802-2000s]

"The Making of the Modern World provides digital facsimile images of unique primary sources that track the development of the modern, western world through the lens of trade and wealth from 1450-1914."

"Based on Joseph Sabin's landmark bibliography, this collection contains works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900's. Included are books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more. With over 6 million pages from 29,000 works, this collection is a cornerstone in the study of the western hemisphere."

Digital Archives

ArchiveGrid is a database designed specifically for locating archival collections held in libraries, museums and other institutions. It combines all the archival records in WorldCat with others pulled from various archives’ Web sites. Included are all of the item records added to the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) after 1987, as well as many records from earlier years. (NUCMC includes records added before 1987, especially of smaller archives, that are not found in ArchiveGrid.)

Contains a library of digital images, covering many time periods and cultures, and documents the fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design, as well as many other forms of visual culture.

The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among librarians, scholars, educators, and private industry representatives since the early 1990s. Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historic records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials, but these digital collections often exist in silos. The DPLA brings these different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together in a single platform and portal, providing open and coherent access to our society’s digitized cultural heritage.

Please note: The British Library is experiencing a major technology outage as a result of a cyber-attack. Access may be limited or unavailable at this time.

Direct access to several million digital objects: film, photos, paintings, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers, and archival papers. Selected from previously digitized resources available in Europe's museums, libraries, archives, and audio-visual collections. French and German cultural institutions are particularly well represented.

The OAC brings together historical materials from a variety of California institutions, including museums, historical societies, and archives. It includes searchable finding aids for collections held in these institutions as well as a large selection of scanned images and documents from these collections.