Chapter 9

Academic Databases

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by

arranging what we have known since long.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Austrian-British philosopher

Several avenues are now available for researchers and students to retrieve the latest
information for their academic and research works. In the past, the choices were few,
and they had to depend heavily on the meagre library repositories available as printed
books, journals, abstracting journals, and indexes. Because of rapid developments in
information and communication technology, printed information sources are being
replaced by electronic sources such as online databases, e-journals, and e-books. In
the recent years, most abstracting and indexing service providers have switched over
to online storage discontinuing print format altogether. These online resources are
available to you as soon as they are published. By sitting in front of the personal
computer, you can retrieve a good chunk of information resources.
The use of Internet for information retrieval is rapidly increasing, thus changing
the traditional functions and services of the libraries. The Internet can be considered
as a big library for all kinds of information. Most information sources are available
online free of charges although some are subscription based. Internet also provides
worldwide access to online databases, electronic journals, e-books, online library
catalogues, publishers’ catalogues, encyclopaedias, online dictionaries, e-conference
reports, digital libraries, website of organizations, and many others. With the rise in
the use of Internet, most educational and research organizations have developed
their own websites for providing the latest information on their services, products,
publications, and programmes.
With the advent of computers, networking, and Internet, it is now possible to access
information sources from anywhere at any time. Many digital libraries, publishers,
and organizations provide access to their online information sources 24 h on Internet.
Authors and publishers are also happy to make available their articles online free or
for a fee because online accessibility of articles dramatically increase their citation
frequencies and impact factors of their journals. Users can access, download, and
store the required information in their computers and can use them for academic and
research purposes.
© The Author(s) 2021 227
C. G. Thomas, Research Methodology and Scientific Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64865-7_9
228 9 Academic Databases

A database is a systematically prepared collection of information covering

different subject disciplines, which can be accessed in various ways. A digital
database is a computer programme that organizes, describes, and indexes informa-
tion. It permits the user to search for specific types of information, depending upon
the selected search parameters. A database is made up of records, which consist
of smaller units of information called fields. Common bibliographic database fields
are: author, publication title, article title, subject or keywords, date of publication,
volume, issue, and page numbers. A database that is accessible from a local network
or the Internet is an online database, as opposed to one that is stored on an individual
computer. Online databases are hosted on websites, made accessible through a web
browser. They may be free or subscription based.

9.1 Bibliographic Databases

Indexes are common in books for easy location of subject terms. An indexing journal
publishes indexes to books and articles similar to the above. It gives a citation,
which is helpful to identify the source material along with name of author/s, title of
article, title of journal or book, publisher, date of publication, and subject indexes.
An abstracting journal performs the same function as that of an indexing journal, but
in addition, provides an abstract or brief summary of the paper being indexed giving
extra information.
Abstracting and indexing databases provide access to primary research litera-
ture such as journals, monographs, treatises, technical reports, conference papers,
and government documents based on subjects, classification, author, and region
or country. Computer technology has brought in great changes in indexing and
abstracting services (Fig. 9.1). Presently, print form of abstracting and indexing
journals is almost vanishing. Most of the big publishers have stopped publishing
print versions of journals and completely switched over to web-based databases.
Presently, there are several bibliographic databases, which also provides full texts
of articles in collaboration with publishers. Brief notes on important bibliographic
services are provided here.

CABI Abstracts
CABI Abstracts, published by the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences Interna-
tional (CABI, formerly CAB, Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, see Sect. 9.8),
are very popular in Commonwealth countries. CABI makes abstracts of most primary
and secondary sources such as journal articles, conference proceedings, theses,
reports, patents, and new books. A record in CABI Abstracts database contains
informative abstracts with bibliographic description needed to locate the original
article.
CABI Abstracts maintain over 9.0 million records collected during the period from
1973 to the present. The database includes both national and international journals
and other sources in agriculture, forestry, environment, veterinary sciences, applied
9.1 Bibliographic Databases 229

Fig. 9.1 Advances in computer technology enable you to access most of the online databases such
as CAB Direct or PubMed by sitting in your room

economics, food science, nutrition, and allied disciplines in life sciences. Journals,
proceedings, books, and agricultural serials are covered. Excellent subject index and
author index assist the search for relevant abstracts. Abstracts of literature from 1913
to 1972 are archived and available as CAB Abstracts Archive, which has more than
1.8 million records.

Global Health
Global Health is a bibliographic database from CABI, which focuses on literature in
public health and medical health science. The database contains 3.0 million scientific
records from 1983 to the present derived from over 7300 journals, reports, books,
and conferences. Global Health claims to add about 160,000 records each year. The
abstracts of global health literature from 1910 to 1983 are archived and available as
Global Health Archive, which contains about 0.8 million records.

CAB Direct (http://www.cabdirect.org/)

A subscription-based database, CAB Direct is CABI’s online platform, which
provides single point of access to all CABI database subscriptions. This online
database is a source of references for agriculture and other applied life sciences
including medicine with more than 11 million bibliographic records across the
applied life sciences and over 340,000 full-text articles incorporating the leading
bibliographic databases in CABI Abstracts and Global Health. CAB Direct has
Google-like search functionality to enable users to find what they need quickly and
easily. CAB Direct uses CAB Thesaurus, an online index from CABI for searching.
Publications from 158 countries in 50 languages are abstracted. Relevant non-
English-language papers are translated into English. It also contains good amount
230 9 Academic Databases

of grey literature such as proceedings, patents, theses, electronic publications, and

relevant but difficult-to-find literature sources.

CAB Thesaurus (https://www.cabi.org/cabthesaurus/)

CAB Thesaurus provides a controlled vocabulary resource of descriptive terms for
the applied life sciences. It acts as the search tool for all users of CAB Direct. Regu-
larly updated, it has broad coverage of agriculture and life sciences, technology,
and social sciences with over 2.7 million terms, which includes about 166,000
distinct concepts (preferred terms) and 132,000 synonyms, along with translations of
these from English into 10 European languages. It also includes broad, narrow, and
related terms to help users find relevant terminology. The thesaurus lists variations
on terminology, broader terms are larger in scope and narrower terms are limited in
scope.

Chemical Abstracts (http://www.cas.org)

Chemical Abstracts and related products are produced by Chemical Abstracts
Service (CAS), a part of the American Chemical Society. It was started in 1907.
CAS discontinued print form of Chemical Abstracts from 2010. However, Chem-
ical Abstracts can continue to be accessed by subscription through CAS products.
Chemical Abstract Service maintains two principal databases, CA Plus and CAS
Registry. CA Plus database stores bibliographic details and abstracts of all articles
from chemistry-related journals; in addition, it also stores articles on chemistry from
other scientific journals and publications.
The CAS claims to monitor and cover every year more than 10,000 journals and
other products such as technical reports, dissertations, conference proceedings, and
new books, in about 50 languages. Patent documents from 63 patent authorities
are also covered. CAS Registry stores information covering more than 130 million
organic and inorganic substances, and over 64 million protein and DNA sequences.
CAS offers access to its databases through search tools such as SciFinder and STN
(Scientific and Technical Information Network).

Biological Abstracts
Biological Abstracts is a database now owned by Clarivate Analytics. Started in 1926,
it covers more than 4300 peer-reviewed journals. It includes abstracts from peer-
reviewed academic journal articles in biology-related areas such as botany, zoology,
biochemistry, biotechnology, pre-clinical and experimental medicine, pharmacology,
agriculture, and veterinary medicine. It can be accessed through a number of services,
including EBSCO, Ovid, and Web of Science. A similar publication is Biological
Abstracts/RRM (Reports, Reviews, Meetings), which is meant to cover meetings and
conferences, literature reviews, US patents, books, software, and other such sources.
The combination of the two is marketed as BIOSIS Previews.

AGRIS (http://agris.fao.org/)
AGRIS (International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Tech-
nology) is a popular database devoted to agriculture, which started functioning in
9.1 Bibliographic Databases 231

1975 under the aegis of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
(FAO). AGRIS corresponds to the earlier print publication of FAO AgrIndex, which
stopped its publication in print form from 1995.
AGRIS with over 8.0 million bibliographical records covers many aspects of
agriculture, including forestry, animal husbandry, fisheries, human nutrition, and
extension literature from about 150 participating institutions representing 65 coun-
tries. AGRIS also covers good amount of grey literature including theses, conference
papers, unpublished scientific and technical reports, and government publications.
The database is maintained by Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research
for Development (CIARD) movement, a joint initiative co-led by the Consultative
Group on International agricultural Research (CGIAR), Global Forum on Agri-
cultural Research and Innovation (GFAR), and FAO, who are working together to
make agricultural research information and knowledge publicly accessible. Presently,
AGRIS is an international cooperative system to serve both developed and developing
countries.
The AGRIS search system permits researchers, students, and others to have
advanced searches using keywords from the AGROVOC thesaurus, journal titles,
authors, institutions, and countries. In addition to abstracts, a good percentage
(around 20%) of bibliographical records have full-text documents, which are
retrievable by Google.

AGROVOC
AGROVOC, a multilingual thesaurus, is a collaborative effort coordinated by FAO
and maintained by an international community of experts and institutions. Developed
in the 1980s, the main objective of AGROVOC is to standardize the indexing process
for the AGRIS database to make searching efficient and simpler, thus directing the
user to the most appropriate resources. In the present form, AGROVOC is expressed
using a concept scheme. It now contains close to 35,000 plus concepts available in 29
languages covering subjects like agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and nutrition,
and environment. AGROVOC is widely used by librarians, information technology
managers, and many others for indexing, retrieving, and organizing data in informa-
tion management systems. AGROVOC is available at: http://aims.fao.org/standards/
agrovoc.

AGRICOLA
AGRICOLA (Agricultural On Line Access), started in 1970, now with over 5.2
million records is a database created and maintained by the United States Department
of Agriculture. AGRICOLA database serves as the online catalogue and index for the
collections of the United States National Agricultural Library (NAL), which covers
all aspects of agriculture and allied fields including plant sciences, forestry, farming
and farming systems, agricultural economics, extension and education, food and
human nutrition, earth and environmental sciences, animal and veterinary sciences,
aquaculture, and fisheries.
AGRICOLA includes journal articles, monographs, theses, patents, computer
software, audio-visual materials, and technical reports. It consists of two subsets
232 9 Academic Databases

of records. The first contains citations for journal articles that include abstracts. The
second consists of bibliographic records describing monographs, serials, audio-visual
materials, and online content from around the world.
Other forms of publications such as books, pamphlets, conference proceedings,
translations, book chapters, research reports, and government documents are also
included in the database. AGRICOLA records also contain links to full-text resources
on the web. You can search AGRICOLA free of charge on the NAL website (http://
agricola.nal.usda.gov/).

NAL Agricultural Thesaurus (NALT)

The thesaurus used by National Agricultural Library (NAL) is a hierarchical vocab-
ulary of terms related to agriculture, biology, and related disciplines. NALT provides
extensive coverage of agriculture, biology, and allied disciplines, which is search-
able by 17 subject categories. The thesaurus is updated annually, and presently, it
contains over 135,000 terms including 63,000 cross-references. It also gives a glos-
sary of definitions for technical terms. NALT is now used extensively for retrieval in
agricultural information systems within and outside USDA. You can access NALT
through https://agclass.nal.usda.gov/.

MEDLINE (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/medline.html)
Published by the National Library of Medicine, USA, once Index Medicus in
print was the most comprehensive index of the world’s biomedical literature. From
2005, the printed publication was discontinued because of the popularity of online
resources like MEDLINE and PubMed, which could be used in its place. Medical
Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE) functions as an impor-
tant resource for biomedical researchers all over the world. Compiled by the US
National Library of Medicine (NLM), Maryland, USA, MEDLINE is freely avail-
able on the Internet and searchable through the search engines, PubMed or Entrez.
In fact, MEDLINE is the online equivalent of the print resources, Index Medicus,
Index to Dental literature, and the International Nursing Index.

MEDLINE provides bibliographic citations and abstracts of over 25 million

records from about 5200 professional journals in about 40 languages covering all
aspects of life sciences, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine,
and health care. It also covers literature in molecular biology, biotechnology, and
biochemistry from 1950 to the present. The records are indexed with NLM Medical
Subject Headings (MeSH).

MedlinePlus (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/)
MedlinePlus, another product of the NLM (National Library of Medicine), is
meant mainly for patients and their families. It offers a wealth of information for
health professionals too. MedlinePlus brings together information from the NLM,
the National Institutes of Health (NIH), other U.S. Government agencies, and health
organizations. This free website provides information in almost 1000 health topics,
especially diseases and wellness issues in simple language avoiding many of the
medical jargons. MedlinePlus can be accessed for various purposes such as learning
9.1 Bibliographic Databases 233

about recent trends in treatments, collecting details about a drug or supplement,

getting the meanings of technical words, or for watching medical videos.

PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/)
PubMed is a free search engine or database maintained by the National Centre
for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the US National Library of Medicine
(NLM) for accessing more than 28 million citations from MEDLINE, journals in life
sciences, and online books. Normally, citations may also include links to full-text arti-
cles from PubMed Central and some other publisher websites. PubMed covers almost
all the biomedical fields such as medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine,
health care, and preclinical sciences.

PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/)

PubMed Central (PMC) is a digital archive to collect and preserve the full text of
biomedical and life sciences literature managed by the National Centre for Biotech-
nology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). PMC
offers free access to all the articles from journals deposited in the archive. Currently,
the number of articles archived in PMC is 4.1 million. It is linked to PubMed and is
fully searchable. Access to the full text of all PubMed Central articles is free.

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh)

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) provides the U.S. National Library of
Medicine (NLM) controlled vocabulary for indexing articles from about 5200 of
the world’s leading biomedical journals for the MEDLINE and PubMed database.
MeSH can be browsed and downloaded free of charge through PubMed. MeSH
terminology is helpful as it provides a consistent way to retrieve information for
the same topic. All MeSH terms are arranged alphabetically as well as in subject
groups. The subject headings or descriptors are arranged in hierarchical levels. All
the terms are arranged from the most general to the most specific, followed by a short
explanation, links to related subject headings, and a list of synonyms. Because of the
presence of synonym lists, MeSH can also be considered as a thesaurus.

PubChem
PubChem is a database providing information on the biological activities of small
chemical molecules. The database system is maintained by the National Centre
for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a component of the National Library of
Medicine, USA. PubChem includes information on substances (236 million entries),
compound structures (93.9 million entries), and bioassay bioactivity results (1.25
million) through three linked databases—Substance, Compound, and BioAssay. For
more information about using each component database, visit the homepage of
PubChem (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) and use the links provided.

TOXLINE (http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/)
Toxicology literature Online (TOXLINE) provides abstracts of articles on
chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and pollutants through TOXNET.
234 9 Academic Databases

TOXLINE is produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) of USA.

ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/)
ScienceDirect is an online repository of full-text journal articles and book chap-
ters operated by the Dutch publisher Elsevier. Presently, it has more than 12 million
contents from 3800 journals and more than 35,000 book titles and over 11,000
e-books, reference works, book series, and handbooks. The articles are arranged
under four main sections and several sub-disciplines. The main sections are Phys-
ical Sciences and Engineering, Life Sciences, Health Sciences, and Social Sciences
and Humanities. For most articles on the repository, abstracts are freely available;
however, access to full text of the articles requires subscription.

EMBASE (https://www.elsevier.com/)
Excerpta Medica Database or EMBASE is a biomedical and pharmacological
database produced by Elsevier. The database indexes more than 8500 journals,
including over 2900 not available in MEDLINE, and has over 31 million records.
It provides clinical and experimental information with extensive coverage of drug
research, pharmacology, pharmacy, and toxicology, public health, and mental health
topics with abstracts back to 1974. This database is available through subscription.

CINAHL
Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) provides online
access to citations and abstracts in nursing, health, biomedicine, and healthcare.
Started in 1961 as the Cumulative Index to Nursing Literature (CINL) in print, its
title was changed to Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature in
1977 when they expanded it to include allied health journals. The index became
online from 1984. EBSCO Publishing acquired CINAHL Information Systems, and
presently, they bring forth CINAHL. Visit the site:
https://health.ebsco.com/products/the-cinahl-database.

FSTA Abstracts
Food Science and Technology Abstracts (FSTA) is produced by International
Food Information Service (IFIS). FSTA is a bibliographic abstracting and indexing
database of scientific and technological research, which provides thorough coverage
of pure and applied research in food science, food technology, and nutrition. The
database is useful for researchers, industry practitioners, and students.
FSTA covers food science, food technology, and nutrition including food addi-
tives, biotechnology, food safety, functional and novel foods, and packaging. In
addition to about 5500 active and historical journals, FSTA indexes books, trade
publications, reviews, conference proceedings, reports, patents, and standards. With
records dating back to 1969, FSTA contains information sources in 29 languages,
sourced from publishers in over 60 countries. It is available on subscription through
9.1 Bibliographic Databases 235

EBSCOhost, Ovid, Proquest Dialog, STN, and Web of Science. Visit the site https://
www.ifis.org/fsta for more information.

Inspec
Inspec is a prominent database of scientific and technical literature published by
the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET, formerly IEE, the Institution of
Electrical Engineers). The IET is one of the largest engineering institutions with over
168,000 members in 150 countries. It is multidisciplinary to reflect the increasingly
diverse nature of engineering. Inspec was started in 1967 as an outgrowth of the
Science Abstracts service.
The subject coverage of Inspec includes astronomy, communications, computers
and computing, computer science, control engineering, electronics, electrical engi-
neering, mechanical engineering, information technology, physics, manufacturing,
and production. Inspec also includes information technology for business. You
can access Inspec through InspecDirect and avenues such as Web of Science on
subscription. Visit the site: https://www.theiet.org/.

Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD)

OATD is an index of over 4.6 million electronic theses and dissertations. It is a good
resource to find open access theses and dissertations published around the world. They
receive information about the theses (metadata) from over 1100 colleges, universi-
ties, and research institutions. Many of the records come from their own repositories,
but others are from regional or national electronic theses and dissertations (ETD)
consortia. The full text of all papers is on the original hosting site, usually the repos-
itory of the university that granted the degree. Please note that OATD indexes about
the first 30 pages of some theses to show search hits only, but in no case indexes or
stores the full text. You can access OATD at https://oatd.org/

Shodhganga (http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/)
Shodhganga is a digital repository of Indian theses and dissertations. It is main-
tained by the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre, Gandhinagar,
an autonomous Inter-University Centre (IUC) of University Grants Commission
(UGC) of India. The repository has the ability to capture, index, store, disseminate,
and preserve electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) submitted by the researchers.
Note that ‘Shodhganga’ is a coined term, the word ‘Shodh’ is from Sanskrit, which
stands for research and discovery. The ‘Ganga’ is the holy river of India symbolizing
the long held culture and civilization of India.
Shodhganga provides a platform for research students to deposit their Ph.D. theses
and make it available to the research scholars and scientists in open access. The
Shodhganga repository was created after UGC made mandatory through regulations
for all universities to submit soft copies of Ph.D. theses and M.Phil. dissertations to
the UGC for hosting in the INFLIBNET. Currently, it stores over 2 lakhs full-text
theses from 355 universities.
236 9 Academic Databases

Krishikosh (http://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/)
Krishikosh is a repository of National Agricultural Research System (NARS) of
India. It is a digital store house of accumulated knowledge such as theses, books,
research articles, monographs, conference proceedings, case studies, and other grey
literatures spread all over the country in different ICAR Research Institutions and
State Agricultural Universities (SAUs). The Indian Council of Agricultural Research
(ICAR) has made it mandatory to upload all Institutional publications such as theses,
research articles, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, case studies,
annual reports, newsletters, brochures, bulletins, summary of the completed projects,
and other grey literatures available with the various SAUs in the Krishikosh. MSc
and Ph.D. theses (full text) and summary of completed research projects are to be
deposited in the Krishikosh repository after completion of the work. The metadata
such as the title, abstract, authors, publisher, etc. will be made freely accessible from
the time of deposition of the content; however, their free unrestricted use is permitted
through open access after an embargo period of not more than 12 months.

BioRxiv (https://www.biorxiv.org/)
BioRxiv (pronounced bioarchive) is a free online archive and distribution service
for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory. By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings
immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft
manuscripts before they are submitted to journals. Articles are not peer-reviewed,
edited, or typeset before being posted online. Authors may submit a revised version
of an article to bioRxiv at any time. Once posted on bioRxiv, articles are citable
and therefore cannot be removed. BioRxiv accepts preprints of articles covering all
aspects of research in life sciences.

ArXiv.org (https://arxiv.org/)
ArXiv (pronounced archive) is a repository of electronic preprints or e-prints
consisting of scientific papers in the fields of physics, astronomy, mathematics, statis-
tics, computer science, electrical engineering, quantitative biology, and economics,
which can be accessed online. ArXiv is owned and operated by Cornell University.
Users can retrieve papers from ArXiv via the web interface.

Current Contents
Although abstracting and indexing services are useful, they are mainly for a retro-
spective search of literature. Current Contents is a publication by Clarivate Analytics
providing currant awareness on a variety of subjects. This is published as a weekly in
seven editions (Clinical practise; Agriculture, biology, and environmental sciences;
Engineering, technology, and applied sciences; Social and behavioural sciences; Life
sciences; Physical, chemical, and earth sciences; and Arts and humanities). It repro-
duces the content pages of the most important journals in their respective fields.
Each issue also contains a subject index of the papers in each journal and an index
of authors with their addresses to facilitate acquisition of reprints.
9.1 Bibliographic Databases 237

Current Contents Connect is the online version of Current Contents series. It is

available bundled with Web of Science. It is a multidisciplinary current awareness
database providing easy web access to the most recently published issues of leading
scholarly journals.

9.2 General Search Engines

A search engine is a software system specially designed to search for information on

the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results,
often referred to as ‘search engine results pages’ (SERPs). The information may
be a blend of web pages, images, and other types of files. They help to mine data
available in databases and play an important role in retrieving required information.
Search engines provide us with links to other websites relevant to the subject we are
searching.
To search the topic of interest effectively, you need to define it first. Decide in
unambiguous terms what information you want to get. After doing this, pick out the
key words that best describe the concepts. Using these key words, you can search the
topics on various search engines or online databases. From among the multitude of
web pages and sources listed, you have to pick the most suitable and relevant ones.
Many types of search engines are presently available for the users. A few examples,
which are helpful to the research community, are included below.
By far, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are the most popular general search engines.
However, there are several other useful search engines too. If one search on a
particular search engine fails, try another until you get the required results.

Google (http://www.google.com/)
Google is considered as the world’s largest search engine, and in the beginning
of 2018, its market share was 90 percent, much ahead of others. Bing occupies
about 3.0 percent, Baidu (Chinese) 2.0 percent, and Yahoo! 2.0 percent. Google was
founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at
Stanford University in California. The search engine is immensely popular among
users because of its high relevancy of results. By indexing billions of web pages,
Google helps the users to search and locate the information they desire. Google
has also diversified their web search technology into other search services including
images, news, maps, and video.

Google’s fast growth since incorporation has initiated a chain of products, acqui-
sitions, and partnerships apart from their core search engine, the Google Search.
Presently, Google offers several services such as e-mail (Gmail), academic work
(Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides), time management (Google
Calendar), cloud storage (Google Drive), social networking (Google+), instant
messaging and video chat (Google Allo, Google Duo, Hangouts), language trans-
lation (Google Translate), mapping and navigation (Google Maps, Waze, Google
238 9 Academic Databases

Earth, Google Street View), video sharing (YouTube), note-taking (Google Keep),
and photo organizing and editing (Google Photos).
Google Books and Google Scholar are two products often used by academic
community (described elsewhere). Google Earth is a popular interactive mapping
tool powered by satellite and aerial imagery, which covers major part of the earth.
You can also form discussion groups and participate in the discussions by sending
group messages.

Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/)
Yahoo! is also a popular search engine offering many services such as e-mail,
besides acting as a search engine. Yahoo! provides a lot of information including the
latest news and entertainment programmers and helps users instant access to other
Yahoo! services such as e-mail, maps, finance, and group messaging facilities.

Bing (http://www.bing.com)
Bing is Microsoft’s search engine. Formerly, it was known in several names as Live
Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search. Bing provides a variety of search
services similar to other popular search engines including news, videos, images,
maps, and shopping.

Wiki.com (http://wiki.com/)
This search engine pulls its results from numerous Wikis on the Web. Wiki.com
is a specific search engine for those who want to search information from various
Wiki products.

DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/)
DuckDuckGo (DDG) stresses on protecting visitors’ privacy and, therefore, does
not collect or store any of visitors’ personal information. DuckDuckGo distinguishes
itself from other search engines by not profiling its users.

Gibiru (http://www.gibiru.com/)
Gibiru does not install any personalization and tracking cookies on your system.
Gibiru provides uncensored and non-personalized web and news results. You can
browse the Internet safely.

Yandex (https://yandex.com/)
Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia. It is also popular in Belarus,
Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Ukraine. It also provides some other uses like cloud storage
service.

Swisscows (https://swisscows.com/)
Swisscows came up as an alternative for anyone who attaches importance to data
integrity and the protection of privacy. Users at Swisscows do not leave any tracks.
The owners claim that topics, IP addresses, and personal information of visitors
are not stored or used for any additional business. As all the servers are located in
Switzerland, they claim that neither the USA nor other data snoopers can access users’
information. It uses artificial intelligence to determine the context of a question.
9.2 General Search Engines 239

SlideShare (https://www.slideshare.net/)
SlideShare is an exclusive search engine, which allows you to search for docu-
mented slideshow presentations. You can also search for e-books and documents.
SlideShare also allows you to save slides and even download the entire slideshow for
use on your local computer. Users can upload files privately or publicly in PowerPoint,
Word, PDF, or Open Document Format (ODF).

Ask.com (http://www.ask.com/)
Ask.com is a question answering-focused search engine based in the USA.
Ask.com was formerly known as Ask Jeeves. It allows users to get answers to any
types of questions. When you ask a question or type a key word, it will take you to
relevant websites, which provides information. It also shows you related searches.

9.3 Metasearch Engines

Metasearch engines work differently from single search engines. They enquire into
multiple search engines or databases, and aggregate the results into a single list or
display them according to their source. Users need to enter search items only once,
and they can access information from several search engines at once. They function
on the premise that as the web is too vast for any single search engine to access all the
data, more meaningful search is possible using several search engines by a combined
operation. This may also save the user from relying on multiple search engines. Actu-
ally, metasearch engines create a ‘virtual database’, instead of compiling a physical
database as others do. They take a user’s request, pass it to several other search
engines and databases, and then compile the results homogeneously based on a
specific algorithm.
Certain metasearch engines attempt to search only the most popular search
engines, but some others search less popular search engines too including newsgroups
and other information resources. Metasearch engines also differ in the method of
presenting search results. Some of them just list results according to search engine
or database, while some others return results according to relevance. However, as
metasearch engines have no direct access to the database of search engines, the results
may not be relevant always. The following are some prominent metasearch engines.

Dogpile http://www.dogpile.com/
Excite http://www.excite.com/
HotBot https://www.hotbot.com/
Info.com https://www.info.com/
Metacrawler https://www.metacrawler.com/
Searx https://searx.me/
Startpage.com https://www.startpage.com/
(continued)
240 9 Academic Databases

(continued)
WebCrawler https://www.webcrawler.com/
Yippy https://yippy.com/

9.4 Academic Search Engines

Some specialist search engines help us to mine academic and scientific contents.
Note that most bibliographic databases such as CAB Direct and PubMed also have
search functionality.
Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/)
Google Scholar is a freely accessible search engine that indexes the full text or
metadata of academic literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
Started in 2004, Google Scholar searches a variety of information sources on the
web, which includes journal articles, conference papers, abstracts, theses, books,
and other such academic publications cutting across many disciplines and sources. It
has a ‘cited by’ feature, through which Google Scholar provides access to abstracts of
articles that have cited the article you are screening. This ‘cited by’ feature is similar
to the citation indexing found in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, CiteSeerX,
and Elsevier’s Scopus. Google Scholar citations help the authors to keep track of
citations to their articles. One can check who is citing your publications and compute
citation indexes like g-index and h-index. Google Scholar automatically calculates
and displays the individual’s total citation count, h-index, and i10-index.
It is also possible for you to make your profile public through Google Scholar;
when someone searches for your name, it will appear along with the results. Google
Scholar has another useful feature, ‘Related articles’ through which it gives a list of
closely related articles, ranked based on similarities with the original result.
Entrez (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gquery)
Entrez, a search engine for life sciences, is a powerful federated search engine that
is designed for searching several linked databases. Federated search allows simulta-
neous search of multiple searchable resources. Entrez allows users to search many
databases related to biomedical sciences at the National Centre for Biotechnology
Information (NCBI), a part of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). To
access information from various databases, the user put up a single query supported
by Boolean operators, which is then circulated to all the search engines partici-
pating in the federation. The search engine then accumulates the results received
from various databases. Some textbooks are also available online through the Entrez
system.

PubAg
PubAg is the search system of National Agricultural Library (NAL), USDA for
agricultural information. It is free on the Internet at: https://pubag.nal.usda.gov/.
9.4 Academic Search Engines 241

PubAg is part of the AGRICOLA family of products. PubAg contains full-text articles
relevant to agriculture along with citations to peer-reviewed journal articles and links
for full-text access. PubAg searching is accomplished by entering your terms in the
search box and clicking the search button. They also provide search suggestions to
assist searching. When multiple terms are entered with no connector, they will be
combined in the search with an implicit ‘AND’. Using the drop-down menu, you can
narrow your search of PubAg to terms in the following fields: Title, Author, Subject,
or Journal. The default setting is to search ‘All Fields’.
PubAg covers most topics in agricultural sciences including nutrition, food
safety, food quality, animal and crop production and protection, natural resources,
sustainable agricultural systems, rural development, agricultural economics and
policy issues, agricultural imports and exports, agricultural statistics, and extension
education.
You may wonder how PubAg is different from AGRICOLA. AGRICOLA serves
as the public catalogue of the National Agricultural Library. It contains records for
all of the holdings of the Library. It also contains citations to articles. AGRICOLA
also contains citations to many items that, while valuable and relevant to the agri-
cultural sciences, are not peer-reviewed journal articles. In addition, AGRICOLA
has a different interface. Therefore, while there is some overlap between the two
resources, they are different in significant ways.
Microsoft Academic (https://academic.microsoft.com/)
Microsoft Academic is a free academic search engine from the Microsoft group.
Apart from search results and access to sources, it also gives citation information such
as number of citations, g-index, and h-index. Microsoft Academic has been posited as
a competitor to Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus for academic research
purposes as well as citation analysis. Using Microsoft Academic, you can search
within any of the domains listed in their homepage. The list of domains include
agriculture science, arts and humanities, biology, chemistry, computer science,
economics and business, engineering, environmental science, geoscience, material
science, mathematics, medicine, physics, social science, and multidisciplinary. Some
domains may have sub-categories.

BASE (http://www.base-search.net/)
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE), created and developed by Biele-
feld University Library, is a multidisciplinary search engine for locating academic
resources on the web. It is one of the world’s big search engines for academic web
resources. Resources are selected based on academic relevance. Wherever available,
the search results are shown with accurate bibliographic details. There are several
options for sorting the result list, and search results can be refined by author, resource,
document type, language, etc. You can freely access the full texts of about 60 percent
of the indexed documents.

CiteSeerX (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/)
CiteSeerX functions as a search engine and digital library for scientific and
academic papers with a concentration on computer and information science. It was
242 9 Academic Databases

developed by Dr Isaac Councill and Dr C. Lee Giles of Pennsylvania State Univer-

sity. It can actively search and retrieve both academic and scientific documents on
the web. It also uses a citation index, which allow query by citations, and ranking of
documents by the impact of citations.

CiteULike (http://www.citeulike.org/)
CiteULike is a free web service for managing and discovering academic refer-
ences. It allows users to save and share citations to academic papers. Based on
the principle of social bookmarking, the site works to promote and to develop the
sharing of scientific references among researchers. Using CiteULike, scientists can
also share citation information. CiteULike gives access to personal or shared bibli-
ographies directly from the web. New entries are added as public by default, which
makes them accessible to everyone. Entries can be added as private, and such entries
are available to the specific user only.

PubPsych (https://www.pubpsych.eu/)
PubPsych is a free information retrieval system for resources related to
psychology. It provides a comprehensive selection of resources from a growing
number of international databases, which cater to the needs of both academic and
professional psychologists.

WorldWideScience.org (https://worldwidescience.org/)
WorldWideScience.org is a global search engine for science, specially planned to
accelerate scientific discovery and progress. It is operated by the Office of Scientific
and Technical Information, a branch of the Office of Science within the US Depart-
ment of Energy. It enables anyone with Internet access to launch a single-query search
of national scientific databases in more than 70 countries. When somebody put a
query, it hits databases from all over the world and displays both English and trans-
lated results. WorldWideScience.org uses federated searching to offer its coverage
of global science and research results. It provides access to ‘deep web’ scientific
databases, which are typically not searchable by commercial search engines.

Science.gov (https://www.science.gov/)
Science.gov is a specialized search engine, which serves as a gateway to United
States government scientific and technical information and research. It uses federated
search technology. Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2200 scientific
websites to provide users with access to more than 200 million pages of authorita-
tive federal science information including research and development results. Search
results can be filtered by author, date, topic, and format (text or multimedia).

Virtual Learning Resources Centre (VLRC) (http://www.virtuallrc.com/)

The Virtual Learning Resources Centre (VLRC) or the Virtual LRC is a specialized
search engine, which hosts an index to the best academic websites selected by teachers
and librarians from around the globe. The site provides students and teachers with
9.4 Academic Search Engines 243

current and valid information for school and university academic projects. The Virtual
LRC acts as a dedicated index of over 10,000 web pages and as a meta-search engine
that collects resources from many of the best research portals and university and
public library Internet subject guides selected based on the recommendations of
teachers and librarians.

Infotopia (http://www.infotopia.info/)
Infotopia is an academic search engine, which pulls from results that have been
curated by librarians, teachers, and other educational workers. It allows users to select
a category from any of the disciplines as arts, history, literature, science/technology,
and so on and then see a list of internal and external resources pertaining to the topic.
In addition to the pages of Infotopia, it suggests external sites too.

ScienceOpen (https://www.scienceopen.com/)
ScienceOpen is a search engine for natural and physical sciences, social sciences,
and humanities. It provides researchers a wide range of free tools to support their
research. It allows relevant research in over 47 million open access articles and article
records. It permits multidimensional search in millions of article records for quick
orientation.

Educational Resources Information Centre (ERIC) (https://eric.ed.gov)

ERIC is operated by the US Department of Education through a formal review
process and provides information on more than 1.3 million bibliographic records
of journal articles, books, conference papers, technical reports, policy papers, and
many types of online materials. The coverage is focused on education research mate-
rials, and the tool is aimed at individuals with an interest in education practices and
researchers in education.

SciDev.Net (https://www.scidev.net/global/)
SciDev.Net is one of the leading sources of reliable and authoritative news, views,
and analysis about science and technology. Although it is a part of CABI, SciDev.Net
is an independent news network. SciDev.Net was founded in 2001 as a way of
bridging the sizeable gap in scientific knowledge between rich and poor countries.
It engages with development professionals, policymakers, researchers, the media,
and the public to use science and technology for global development. The network
through independent journalism helps individuals and organizations to apply science
for decision-making that would result in sustainable development along with poverty
reduction.
SciDev.Net has a global edition based in London, and there are five regional
editions too for Latin America and Caribbean (Spanish), Middle East and North
Africa (Arabic), Asia and Pacific, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa (English and
French).

ResearchGate (https://www.researchgate.net/)
ResearchGate is a massively popular social networking site for academicians and
researchers. ResearchGate was founded in 2008 by virologist and computer scientist
244 9 Academic Databases

Dr. Ijad Madisch with physician Dr. Sören Hofmayer and computer scientist Horst
Fickenscher. It started in Boston, Massachusetts, but later moved to Berlin, Germany.
As of 2018, it has more than 15 million users. Most of ResearchGate’s users are
from medicine, biology, agricultural sciences, engineering, computer science, and
psychology. Numerous researchers submit their publications to the site for anyone
to access. Although it is not a search engine per se that pulls information from
external sources, RG’s own collection provides a good selection of documents. You
can search by publication, subject, and author, or you can even ask questions directly
to researchers.

For browsing articles, registration is not required, but people who wish to become
members should have an email address at a recognized institution or to be manu-
ally confirmed as a published researcher. Each member has a user profile and can
upload research outputs including papers, preprints, data, chapters, patents, research
proposals, methods, and presentations. Users can also ask questions, follow the
activities of other users, and engage in discussions with them.
ResearchGate publishes a citation measurement in the form of an ‘RG Score’. Note
that RG score is not a citation impact measure. It is based on number of publications,
citations, recommendations, questions asked, answers given, and followers. Exact
methodology of computing RG score, however, is not known.

Directory of Open Access Journals (https://doaj.org/)

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an online directory that indexes
and provides access to high-quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. All DOAJ
services are free of charge, and all data are freely available. Presently, it has over
12,300 journals from 129 countries.

9.5 Citation Indexes

A citation index is an interdisciplinary index of citations between publications,

allowing the reader to trace articles cited by or citing other articles. Citation indexes
are helpful to track down articles and documents on similar topics by looking at the
citations they have in common. These indexes are also useful to see all the works
by a particular author and note the author’s impact on the literature. The idea of a
citation index actually began in 1955 with the publishing of an innovative paper in
the much popular journal Science by Eugene Garfield (Garfield 1955).
Garfield was instrumental in establishing the Institute for Scientific Information
(ISI) in 1960 (Thomson Reuters acquired ISI, and it was so until 2016, when they sold
the Intellectual Property & Science Business to Clarivate Analytics. In 2018, Clari-
vate Analytics re-established ISI as part of their Scientific and Academic Research
group). The Science Citation Index (SCI) for natural sciences was the first product
of ISI. In SCI, the bibliographic information is indexed in such a way that one can
search for specific articles by subject, author, source title, or geographical location or
9.5 Citation Indexes 245

organization of the authors. Later, ISI introduced citation indexes in social sciences
(Social Sciences Citation Index, started in 1966); and arts and humanities (Arts and
Humanities Citation Index, started in 1977).
A larger web-based version of Science Citation Index is now available with
many easy to use features, the Science Citation Index Expanded. Presently, all the
above three indexes are accessible through the Web of Science collection of indexes,
owned and maintained by Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now acquired by
Clarivate Analytics.
Once, citation indexing was almost the monopoly of ISI or Clarivate Analytics.
Presently, there are many citation indexes; a notable one is CiteScore based on Scopus
by Elsevier. Citation indexes allow researchers to identify articles which have cited
any particular earlier article or which have cited the articles of any particular author.
It is also useful to find out the articles, which have been cited most frequently.

Web of Science
Web of Science is an online mammoth subscription-based scientific citation indexing
service originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now
maintained by Clarivate Analytics. The database has current and retrospective
coverage from 1900 to the present. WoS platform consisting of several literature
search databases is designed to support scientific and scholarly research. It includes
34,200 journals along with numerous books, proceedings, patents, and data sets.
WoS is now available with its core collection bundled with specialist databases.
Specialist databases are with a subject focus like Medline, BIOSIS Citation Index,
CAB Direct, and Zoological Record. Databases with a document type focus like
Derwent Innovations Index (patents) and Data Citation Index (data sets and data
studies) and databases highlighting content from regions around the world are also
included. If you want to access Web of Science, you require subscription and IP
authentication. Visit: https://clarivate.com/products/web-of-science/.

Web of Science Core Collection

Web of Science core collection is the premier resource on the platform, and includes
over 20,000 peer-reviewed, high-quality, scholarly journals published worldwide. It
also includes open access journals in more than 250 science, social sciences, and
humanities disciplines. In addition, the collection contains over 190,000 conference
proceedings and over 90,000 editorially selected books. It has about 1.5 billion cited
reference connections.
All the journals selected for inclusion in WoS are indexed. For each paper, names
of all the authors, author affiliations, abstract, keywords, funding acknowledgements
including agency and grant numbers, and all the cited references are included. The
Web of Science Core Collection consists of six online databases:
Science Citation Index Expanded: This is the larger web-based version of
Science Citation Index, which covers more than 8850 major journals across 150
disciplines from 1900 to present.
246 9 Academic Databases

Social Sciences Citation Index: This citation database covers more than 3200
journals of social sciences across 55 disciplines as well as selected items from 3500
of the world’s leading scientific journals and the range is from 1900 to present.
Arts and Humanities Citation Index: More than 1700 arts and humanities jour-
nals and selected items from over 250 scientific and social sciences journals from
1975 to present are covered.
Emerging Sources Citation Index: The Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)
was launched as a new database within Web of Science platform. It covers more than
5000 ‘emerging’ journals in science, social science, and humanities. All journals
submitted to the Web of Science will be evaluated for the ESCI first, and if found
suitable, indexed in the ESCI. Please note that journals indexed in the ESCI will not
have Impact Factors, but the citations from the ESCI will be included in the citation
counts for the Journal Citation Reports. Journals indexed in Emerging Sources Cita-
tion Index, based on their acceptability and citations, will be considered for impact
factors later.
Conference Proceedings Citation Index: It includes more than 160,000 confer-
ence titles in Sciences starting from 1990 to the present day. It contains published
reports from important conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, and workshops
covering different disciplines.
Book Citation Index: This is a database of books, which indexes more than
80,000 editorially selected books from 2005 to present.
Two subject-specific chemistry indexes are also part of the Web of Science Core
Collection. These chemistry databases are helpful for creating structure drawings,
enabling users to locate chemical compounds and reactions.
Index Chemicus: This database, useful for chemical scientists, students, and
industry, includes the structures and related supporting data for new organic
compounds reported in leading journals. It indexes 120 organic chemistry journals
to search over 2.6 m compounds from 1993 to present.
Current Chemical Reactions: This database indexes more than 350 chemistry
journals and contains new synthetic methods reported in leading journals and patents
from 39 issuing authorities. It covers more than one million chemical reactions from
1986 to present and INPI archives from 1840 to 1985.
All the above citation indexes are interdisciplinary, and the bibliographic infor-
mation is indexed in such a way that one can search for specific articles by subject,
author, source title, or geographical location or organization of the authors.

Specialist collection
Specialist databases bundled with WoS are with a subject focus. The collection
includes:
BIOSIS Citation Index
BIOSIS Previews
Biological Abstracts
Zoological Record
MEDLINE
CAB Abstracts
9.5 Citation Indexes 247

CABI Global Health

Inspec
FSTA

Regional Collection
From 2008, the Web of Science has been hosting a number of regional citation
indices. The following are regional collections.
Chinese Science Citation Database
Russian Science Citation Index
KCI Korean Journal Database
SciELO Citation Index

Data Collection
Data Citation Index

Patent Collection
Derwent Innovations Index (DII): This provides patent literature from more than 40
patent-issuing authorities.

Current Awareness
Current Contents Connect

Scopus
Scopus is an interdisciplinary bibliographic online database launched in 2004
containing abstracts and citation database as a competitor to Web of Science. Scopus
is owned by Elsevier, an international publication group. Scopus covers diverse
subjects coming under physical and environmental sciences, life sciences, health
sciences, social sciences, engineering, business, and management. Access to Scopus
is through subscription only. It covers about 36,000 journal titles from more than
11,000 international publishers in scientific, medical, technical, and social science
fields, of which nearly 34,000 are peer-reviewed journals. Just like Web of Science
and Google Scholar, Scopus also provides citation information.
Scopus provides you with the option of searching for publications based on search
terms relating to specific parts of a document such as title, author, keywords, and
ISSN. It provides some free features to non-subscribed users too, which is available
through Scopus Preview. Scopus Preview provides access to Scopus Sources, but
not the source comparison tool. Scopus gives four types of quality measure for each
title, which are:
• h-Index
• CiteScore
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR))
• Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP).
Scopus also offers author profiles which cover affiliations, number of publications
and their bibliographic data, references, and details on the number of citations each
published document has received. For more details, visit http://www.scopus.com/.
248 9 Academic Databases

RePEc (http://www.repec.org/)
Research Papers in Economics (RePEc)) is a collaborative effort of numerous
volunteers from 99 countries to augment the dissemination of research information in
economics and related disciplines. It maintains a decentralized bibliographic database
of journal articles, working papers, books, book chapters, and others with the help of
volunteers. RePEc provides links to about 2.6 million documents from 3000 journals
and 4600 working paper series.

Indian Citation Index (http://www.indiancitationindex.com)

Indian Citation Index (ICI) started in 2009 covers peer-reviewed journals
published from India. Presently, it covers more than 700 journals in major subject
areas such as agricultural, medical, scientific, and technical subjects; social sciences;
and arts and humanities. First of its kind in India, the citation database includes both
source titles and reference information.
In addition to the above, the online resources such as Microsoft Academic,
Scopus, CiteSeerX, and Google Scholar (discussed elsewhere) also provide citation
information in various ways.

9.6 Citation Analysis

Most citation indexes were originally designed for information retrieval, but later
they began to be used for obtaining citation details. Presently, they are also used
for bibliometrics and other studies involving research evaluation. Citation analysis
is usually done by counting how many times an article or a researcher is cited. It
presumes that serious research workers and important publications are cited more
frequently than non-serious ones. Impact factor, CiteScore, Cited references, and
Journal rating are the principal means generally followed for this purpose.
Citation analysis is gaining more importance because of the wide dissemination
of the Web of Science subscription databases in many universities and research
organizations, and after the arrival of universally available free citation tools such as
Scopus, Microsoft Academic, CiteSeerX, and Google Scholar.

Impact Factor
The impact factor (IF) is used as an index to signify the importance of published
research papers. Impact factors are calculated for journals (journal impact factor)
and for authors (author impact factor).
Young researchers must try to publish their articles in reputed journals with
high rating scores such as Journal Impact Factor (Clarivate Analytics) or CiteScore
(Scopus). Remember that highly acclaimed papers in reputed journals bring attention
to scientists and their institutions facilitating easy funding and progress of individual
scientists.
9.6 Citation Analysis 249

Journal Impact Factor

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of a journal shows the frequency with which the
articles published in that journal are cited in other research journals. Originally
conceived in the 1960s by Eugene Garfield, who started the Institute for Scientific
Information (ISI) (now part of Clarivate Analytics), IF has gained acceptance as a
numerical index of journal quality. For those journals that are indexed by Clarivate
Analytics’ Journal Citation Reports (JCR), annual impact factors are calculated and
revised on a yearly basis.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is an annual publication by Clarivate Analytics.
Previously, the JCR was published as a part of Science Citation Index. Presently, it
is based on citations compiled from the Science Citation Index Expanded and the
Social Science Citation Index. It provides information about scholarly journals in
the natural sciences and social sciences, selected to have impact factors. It has been
integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core
Collections. Impact factors are calculated yearly starting from 1975 for journals listed
in the Journal Citation Reports. You can access the latest Journal Citation Reports
by searching ‘JCR on the web’.
A complete list of journal titles covered in the 2018 edition of JCR is
available at: https://clarivate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Crv_JCR_Full-Mar
ketingList_A4_2018_v4.pdf.
An additional list of journals for the first time listing in the JCR is also avail-
able at: https://clarivate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Crv_JCR_FirstImpact-
Factor-List_2018_A4_v3.pdf.
Started as an offshoot of the Science Citation Index, JIF provided a distinctive
means of rating journals based on their citations and rapidly became the mantra of
journal quality. JIF for a journal is computed based on a three-year period by dividing
the total number of current year citations with the source articles published in that
journal during the preceding two years. Let us take an example. We want to calculate
IF for 2018. Let ‘x’ be the number of times articles published in 2016 and 2017
were cited in indexed journals during 2018, and ‘y’ the number of articles and others
published in 2016 and 2017. Then, the IF for 2018 would be x/y. Please note that the
impact factor of a journal for 2018 can be published only in 2019, as it is impossible
to assess the journal until all the 2018 issues come out. You can access the latest list
of journals with total citations, journal impact factors, and Eigen factor scores from
the web.
JIF is often employed to show the relative importance of a journal in a particular
field. Many scientists believe that impact factor is a reasonable indicator of journal
quality. For example, journals with higher impact factors are regarded as more impor-
tant and prestigious than others having lower value. It is also helpful for librarians in
selecting journals for library collections. The use of IF as an index of journal quality
relies on the assumption that citation frequency precisely measures a journal’s impor-
tance to its end users. By referring and citing articles from a particular journal in their
own papers, research workers are, in fact, approving and supporting that journal.
250 9 Academic Databases

Some shortcomings of ‘journal impact factor’ must also be noted. The journal
impact factor applies only to a journal, but not to individual journal articles or indi-
vidual scientists. If you want to assess the author’s impact, you have to use ‘author
impact factor’ specifically. Journal impact factor applies to those journals that are
indexed by Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Naturally, journals not covered by JCR
will not have an impact factor. Compared to general scientific journals, specialist
journals get lesser citations only. Similarly, among specialist journals, some attract
several research workers and citations, because of the nature of that discipline, for
example, biotechnology. Certain disciplines may have fewer research workers, and
the impact factor for journals in such disciplines would be low. To solve these kinds
of problems, some organizations have come up with journal rating based on some
specific criteria, for example, the NAAS rating followed in India for agriculture and
allied disciplines (discussed elsewhere).

CiteScore
CiteScore is a new journal metric launched by Elsevier in 2016 as an alternative to
the monopolistic ‘Journal Impact Factor’ of Clarivate Analytics. The two companies
already have competing bibliographical citation databases in Scopus (Elsevier) and
the Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics). For a long time, there was no competition
for the Journal Impact Factor. As the Impact Factor is derived from journals indexed
in the Web of Science, other journals cannot have an Impact Factor. Elsevier launched
CiteScore to counter the JIF of Clarivate Analytics. You can freely access CiteScore
on the Scopus Journal Metrics website. At the same time, JCR is a paid subscription.
Elsevier also claims that CiteScore is calculated from the list of Scopus journals,
which is much larger than the Web of Science list.
CiteScore is computed for a publication as an average of the sum of citations it
received in a particular year to documents published in the immediate three previous
years divided by the total publications in the same previous three years. Use the
following link to find out whether your preferred journal is Scopus indexed. You can
also note down ‘CiteScore’ and other bibliometric values from the site, https://www.
scopus.com/sources.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is a measure of the influence of academic journals that
accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or
prestige of the journals where such citations come from. A journal’s SJR is a numeric
value indicating the average number of weighted citations received during a selected
year per document published in that journal during the previous three years. Higher
SJR values are meant to indicate greater journal prestige. SJR accounts for journal
size by averaging across recent publications, which is calculated annually. SCImago
Journal Rank is powered by inputs from Scopus data and is freely available at https://
www.scopus.com/sources.
Source Normalized Impact Per Paper (SNIP)
This is also a Scopus initiated metric. Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
is an index that accounts for field-specific differences in citation practices. This task
9.6 Citation Analysis 251

is done by relating each journal’s citations per publication with the citation potential
of its field (the set of publications citing that journal). In other words, SNIP tries to
measure contextual citation impact, thus enabling direct comparison of journals in
different subject fields. This is necessitated because of the fact that the value of a
single citation is greater for journals in fields where citations are less likely, and vice
versa. SNIP is calculated annually from Scopus data and is freely available along
with CiteScore and SJR at www.scopus.com/sources.

Eigenfactor
Eigenfactor is intended to reflect the influence and prestige of journals. It is a score
value based on the total importance of a scholarly journal. Journals are rated according
to the number of incoming citations, with citations from highly ranked journals poised
to make a larger contribution to the Eigenfactor than those from poorly ranked jour-
nals. Nevertheless, the Eigenfactor score is influenced by the size of the journal; there-
fore, the score doubles when the journal doubles in size, often measured as number
of published articles per year. Eigenfactor scores are calculated by eigenfactor.org
(http://www.eigenfactor.org/).

NAAS Rating of Journals

Many journals in India do not come under the impact factor scheme of Clarivate
Analytics. The National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS) has recognized
this fact and came up with a scheme for agriculture and related disciplines. According
to the scheme, each journal is assessed, and its relative merit and standing among
researchers is indicated by giving points out of a maximum of 20. Before assigning
points, NAAS first ascertain whether the journal is already having an ‘Impact Factor’
of Clarivate Analytics. For those journals where Journal Impact Factor is available,
the scores are assigned as 6.00 + Impact Factor up to 20.00 (category I), and for
those journals where Clarivate Analytics Impact Factor is not available, the rating is
from 1 to 6.00 only (category II). The academy periodically revises its rating. The
rating is available from http://www.naasindia.org/rating.html.

Author Impact Factor

Journal impact factor considers only the impact of particular journals using the mean
number of times published articles are cited during the two years after their publi-
cation. It is likely that one article in the journal might have been highly cited and
another article hardly at all, but both the authors are judged equally based on the high
impact factor of that journal. To overcome this problem, ‘author impact factors’ have
been suggested, which measure the impact of individual authors. The author impact
factor is based on the scientific value of a given researcher or author. You can try
the h-index, g-index or compile cited references by using Web of Science, Google
Scholar, Scopus, or Microsoft Academic.

h-index
We know that total number of papers published by an individual may not reflect the
quality of his/her scientific activity, while total number of citations can be dispro-
portionately affected because of a single article of major influence. The h-index has
252 9 Academic Databases

been proposed to measure concurrently the quality and quantity of scientific output
of researchers, by computing an index based on the highly cited papers of the author
and the number of citations these papers have received from other publications.
The h-index was proposed by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at the University of
Carolina, San Diego, to measure concurrently the quality and quantity of scientific
output of a scientist based on the highly cited papers of the author and the number of
citations these papers have received from other articles. It was originally meant as a
tool for determining theoretical physicists’ relative quality (Hirsch 2005), which is
sometimes also called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number. The h in h-index stands
for Hirsch and ‘highly cited’.
The h-index is computed based on the highly cited papers of the author and the
number of citations these papers have received from other articles. The h-index gives
a measure of the number of articles (h) of an author that have received at least (h)
citations up to that time. For instance, an h-index of 6 would mean that an author
has 6 articles that have received at least 6 citations each. As the h-index attempts to
measure a researcher’s impact over time, the longer a researcher has been publishing,
the higher the h-index would be! Naturally, established and veteran researchers have
better chance to achieve higher h-indices!
For calculating h-index, several information resources such as Web of Science,
Scopus, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, and ResearchGate are used, which
include the necessary citation data. Please note that because of differential coverage,
each database is likely to produce a different h-index for the same scholar. In addition,
you can also use ‘Publish or Perish’ database to determine your own h-index (https://
harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish).

i10-Index
i10-index has been created by Google Scholar as an alternate author level metric to
h-index. It is a whole number indicating the number of publications of a particular
scientist with at least 10 citations. This simple index is used only by Google Scholar
as a measure to gauge the productivity of a scholar.

g-index
Similar to the h-index, the g-index is also used for quantifying scientific productivity
of a scientist, taking into consideration his/her publication record. It was suggested
by Leo Egghe in 2006 (Egghe 2006). It is also a simple metric similar to h-index
in its functionality, but g-index also takes into consideration the performance of the
highly rated articles by the author.
The g-index is determined depending on the distribution of citations received by
the publications of a particular author. A particular author’s g-index would be g, if
his/her number of highly cited articles is g, and that each of them has brought a
mean of g citations. For example, a g-index of 20 would mean that an author who
published 20 articles had an average of 20 citations for each article. Although this is
similar to the h-index, the number of citations for a single article is not critical unlike
h-index. The g-index attempts to address limitations of the h-index, and g is expected
to be highly correlated with the total number of citations an author has received. At
9.6 Citation Analysis 253

the same time, h-index is in good correlation with the highest number of citations.
Consequently, g-index is found to be always a greater number than h-index.

Cited References
‘Cited references’ is a feature in certain online databases such as Google Scholar.
This feature helps us to locate other publications that are related by topic or subject
to the original publication. Cited references or the references that cite an individual
article can be used to gauge the utility and impact of a cited publication. A frequently
pointed out drawback is that sometimes author self-citing or by publishing in an open
access journal can defeat the usefulness of ‘cited references’.
‘Cited references’ search is one of the features in the Web of Science database. The
number indicated in the citing articles column of Web of Science shows the number
of times the reference has been cited in Web of Science until then. Remember that
‘cited references’ in WoS may not include all the known citations of the paper, but
only those appeared in journals covered by WoS.
As discussed earlier, Google Scholar is a freely accessible search engine for
academic literature that searches a variety of information sources on the web. Each
Google Scholar search result, in addition to showing bibliographic details, indicates
a ‘cited by’ link, displaying a list of documents that have cited the viewing document,
originally retrieved in the search. Note that this includes resources indexed by Google
Scholar only. Microsoft Academic and Scopus also feature ‘cited references’.

9.7 Online Searching Methods

When searching for information from databases such as CABDirect, PubMed, or

other online databases, problems may arise in matching the key words we used with
what is stored in the databases or search engines. Use any of the approved techniques
to narrow your search and find out relevant literature quickly. Two widely used
methods are phrase searching and Boolean searching.

Phrase Searching
In this case, we use a proper name or distinct phrase enclosed in double quotations,
for example: ‘watershed management in India’ or ‘web search engines’. Before you
start searching, think critically the key phrases, proper names or organization, which
you want to search. When the search query is put in double quotations, you are asking
the search engine to use all of these words, in this specific order.

Boolean Searching
Boolean searching allows the user to have a meaningful search by combining words
and phrases using the specific words, AND, OR, and NOT (also known as ‘Boolean
operators’ or ‘search connectors’). Use of these words helps us to limit, widen, or
define the search. Most online databases, Internet search engines, and web directo-
ries support Boolean searches. For a good web search, you should know how to use
254 9 Academic Databases

basic Boolean operators. Boolean search operates based on a method of symbolic

logic, developed by George Boole, an English mathematician. Boolean search tech-
niques allow the user to conduct effective searches culling out many unconnected or
irrelevant documents.
There are two options, you can either use the standard Boolean operators (AND,
OR, or NOT) or their equivalents using math symbols. The user can decide the
method. For example, the Boolean search operator AND is equal to the ‘+’ symbol;
NOT is equal to the ‘—’ symbol; and OR is the default setting of any search engine,
returning automatically all the words you type in.
Suppose that we want to find documents about ‘resistance’ and ‘tolerance’. To get
a general idea of what is available on the web, we perform three keyword searches
before focusing on some aspect of resistance or tolerance as shown below.
• Resistance AND tolerance: This search finds articles that compare resistance and
tolerance. By using AND, you can ‘narrow’ a search by combining terms, and it
will retrieve documents that use both the search terms you specify.
• Resistance OR tolerance: This search finds articles that discuss either resistance or
tolerance. When OR is used, it ‘broadens’ a search to include results that contain
either of the words you type in.
• Resistance NOT tolerance: In this case, the search finds articles that are exclusively
on resistance. That is, using NOT will narrow a search by excluding certain related
search terms, allowing you to retrieve documents that contain one, but not the other
of the search terms you enter.

Implied AND
Many databases and search engines such as Google and many others put AND
between words by default. Implied AND means that a search for ‘water harvesting’
will retrieve ‘water AND harvesting’ and not the phrase water harvesting. Some web
search engines have an implied OR rather than AND.

Nested Searches
Nested searches combine the use of AND and OR in the same search statement. In
such cases, we use parenthesis instead of search connectors. In certain cases, a focused
search is useful, which combines several related words for one idea with another
word or words, as in the search: (rehabilitation or conservation) and watershed. In
this search, we used Boolean OR to combine the related words: rehabilitation or
conservation. Then we used Boolean AND to combine these words with watershed.
Parenthesis indicates relationships between search terms, and it ensures that we get
the expected results from our searches. It forces the computer to process our search
terms in the order we intended and to combine them in the way we want.

Truncated Searches
In certain situations, we may search for part of a word or a whole word that may
have similar beginnings or endings. In such cases, by using a ‘wildcard’, commonly
an asterisk (*) (some search engines use other symbols), we can improve search
9.7 Online Searching Methods 255

results and reduce searching time. For example, to find engine, engines, engineer,
and engineering, use engine*.

9.8 Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International

(CABI)

The ‘Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International’ (CABI), previously

known by the name ‘Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux’ (CAB) is an interna-
tional, not-for-profit inter-Governmental development and information organization
established by a United Nations treaty level agreement between 49 member coun-
tries including India. CABI’s stated mission is ‘to improve people’s lives world-
wide by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems
in agriculture and the environment’. The head office of CABI is in Wallingford,
England.
The history of CABI can be traced to 1910, when an Entomological Research
Committee has been formed. Later, in 1930, it developed into a Commonwealth
organization called the Imperial Agricultural Bureaux. The bureaux was renamed
in 1947 as the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux (CAB) by combining various
activities. In 1986, CAB became CAB International. CABI has three main areas of
operation—scientific publishing, development projects and research, and microbial
services.
A main product of CABI is CAB Abstracts, the world-leading bibliographic
database covering agriculture and the environment. CABI Abstracts are popular and
used by scientists from agriculture and life sciences in a big way. CABI abstracts
covers a vast area of research literature in agriculture and allied fields such as forestry,
veterinary and animals sciences, biotechnology, environmental sciences, and nutri-
tion. A similar database, which focuses on public health and health science, is Global
Health. Presently, CABI Abstracts and Global Health are available online through
CAB Direct (Sect. 9.1). CABI also publishes many other products such as books,
e-books, multimedia compendia, and full-text electronic resources with the objective
of further promoting science and its practical application. For more information, visit
the site https://www.cabi.org/.

9.9 The Indian Academy of Sciences

The Indian Academy of Sciences was formed in 1934 as a society with the main aim
of promoting and upholding the cause of science both in pure and applied branches.
The major activities include publication of scientific journals, organizing confer-
ences, seminars, symposia, and discussions on important topics. The Academy also
promotes scientific talent by recognising their merits through various means such as
256 9 Academic Databases

awards. It also strives for improvement of science education in the country besides
taking up other issues of concern to the scientific community. Publication of scientific
journals and other literature is an important activity of the Academy.
The Academy’s journals are ‘open access’, and full text is available as PDF files
on each journal’s website. The Academy currently publishes 12 journals covering
all major disciplines in science and technology. The journals are:
Bulletin of Materials Science
Current Science (published by the Current Science Association in collaboration
with the Academy)
Dialogue: Science, Scientist and Society
Journal of Astrophysics, & Astronomy
Journal of Biosciences
Journal of Chemical Sciences
Journal of Earth System Science
Journal of Genetics
Pramana (Journal of Physics)
Proceedings-Mathematical Sciences
Resonance (Journal of Science Education)
Sadhana (Academy Proceedings in Engineering Sciences)
In addition to regular journals, the Academy also brings out special publications
of topical interest frequently. All these journals are available online in the open access
mode from http://www.ias.ac.in/.

9.10 National Institute of Science Communication

and Information Resources (NISCAIR)

National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR)

is an important information provider in India functioning under the Council of
Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
The National Institute of Science Communication (NISCOM), a leading insti-
tute of the CSIR had been in existence for the last six decades. During the period,
NISCOM diversified its activities through a multitude of its information products
such as research journals, popular science magazines, books, monographs, ency-
clopaedia, and other information services. Another prestigious institute of the CSIR,
the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre (INSDOC), was engaged in
providing information and documentation services in science and technology through
various means such as abstracting and indexing literature, design and development
of databases, and translation services. It was also providing access to international
information sources, in addition to other activities like human resource development.
INSDOC was also functioning as the host to the National Science Library (NSL)
9.10 National Institute of Science Communication and Information … 257

and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Documenta-
tion Centre. In 2002, by merging NISCOM and INSDOC, the National Institute of
Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) was created.
With the formation of NISCAIR, all the activities of NISCOM and INSDOC
have been combined, elevating NISCAIR as an institute capable of undertaking new
missions in the field of communication, dissemination, and information management
systems and services in science and technology. The main functions of NISCAIR
include collection, storage, publishing, and dissemination of information related to
science and technology in India through a mix of traditional and modern means.
Currently, NISCAIR brings out 18 primary and 2 secondary scientific journals.
The primary journals are:
Annals of Library and Information Studies
Bharatiya Vaigyanik Evam Audyogik Anusandhan Patrika.
Indian Journal of Biochemistry and Biophysics
Indian Journal of Biotechnology
Indian Journal of Chemical Technology
Indian Journal of Chemistry-Sec A
Indian Journal of Chemistry-Sec B
Indian Journal of Engineering & Materials Sciences
Indian Journal of Experimental Biology
Indian Journal of Fibre & Textile Research
Indian Journal of Geo-Marine Sciences
Indian Journal of Natural Products and Resources
Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Physics
Indian Journal of Radio and Space Physics
Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge
Journal of Intellectual Property Rights
Journal of Scientific Temper
Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research
The institute brings out two abstracting journals, Indian Science Abstracts (ISA)
and Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Abstracts (MAPA). Science Reporter is a popular
magazine in English brought out by NISCAIR.
The Indian Science Abstracts (ISA) published fortnightly, which has been in
existence from 1961, covers scientific works done in India. The ISA is available
online from 2000 onwards, which can be accessed by visiting the website http://
isa.niscair.res.in/. It is searchable by document type, title of article, journal name,
subject, author name, keyword, and geographic term.
The Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Abstracts (MAPA), being published as a
bimonthly, covers research works from around the world on agronomy, botany, phar-
macognosy, and biological activities of medicinal and aromatic plants. Advanced
search and full-text search facilities are presently available online for MAPA (www.
niscair.res.in).
258 9 Academic Databases

Another major activity of NISCAIR is translation of science and technology docu-

ments from foreign languages into English. Currently, the institute undertakes trans-
lation from 20 major foreign languages. You can utilize the facilities available at
NISCAIR by visiting the website http://www.niscair.res.in.

9.11 ICAR Initiatives for Knowledge Management

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has established a ‘Directorate

of Knowledge Management in Agriculture’ for dissemination and sharing of agricul-
tural knowledge and information through information products in print, electronic,
and web mode. The books published by ICAR, especially those in the handbook
series, are very popular among researchers and students. The ICAR brings out three
research journals,
Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences
Indian Journal of Animal Sciences (both monthlies)
The Indian Journal of Fisheries (quarterly)
The ICAR also brings out two popular semi-technical magazines, ‘Indian
Farming’ and ‘Indian Horticulture’.
All the above five journals are available in open-access mode. In addition to these
journals, the ICAR supports many other open access journals. You can access all
these journals from the site, http://epubs.icar.org.in/ejournal/.
Krishikosh (http://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/)
Krishikosh is a digital database of accrued knowledge in agriculture and allied
sciences with a huge collection of valuable books, old journals, thesis, research
articles, popular articles, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, success
stories, case studies, annual reports, newsletters, pamphlets, brochures, bulletins
and other grey literatures spread all over the country in different ICAR Research
Institutions and State Agricultural Universities (SAUs).
Under the ICAR’s open access policy, it is mandatory to upload all Institutional
publications available with the SAUs in the Krishikosh. Along with this, full texts of
M.Sc. and Ph.D. theses and summary of completed research projects are submitted
in the Krishikosh repository when the work is completed. The metadata, for example,
title, abstract, authors, publisher, etc., are freely accessible from the time of depo-
sition, but their free and unrestricted use through open access can be made after an
embargo period not more than 12 months.
Currently Krishikosh has more than 83,000 articles items, which include more
than 35,000 Ph.D. and M.Sc. theses submitted by various SAUs and ICAR deemed
universities with full-text searchable facilities.

Consortium for e-Resources in Agriculture (CeRA)

The ICAR has established the Consortium for e-Resources in Agriculture (CeRA)
in 2007 under the National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) of ICAR for
9.11 ICAR Initiatives for Knowledge Management 259

providing online access to e-journals and resources in libraries attached to ICAR insti-
tutes and State Agricultural Universities (SAU’s). The Indian Agricultural Research
Institute (IARI), New Delhi, functions as the host for the entire programme. The
network connectivity already created across various ICAR institutes and SAUs made
CeRA a reality, and through this facility, selected journals are made available for
researchers and students avoiding duplication and wastage of money.
At present, more than 2900 journals related to agriculture and allied sciences from
selected publishers are accessible through CeRA. Full text of articles from journals
marked full text (FT) can be accessed. Provision has also been made to access an
article from a journal, which is not subscribed under the consortium but available
in the library of a particular institution. If any researcher wants articles from such
journals not covered under CeRA, the ‘Document Delivery Request’ (DDR) system
can be used. Those journals marked ‘Request Article’ (RA)comes under this group.
When you click on a journal marked RA, you will be shown a link ‘Request the
Article’, which is meant for this purpose. For obtaining such articles through DDR,
the user has to submit a DDR form. Please note that individuals cannot join CeRA
as a member and access the information, but CeRA is for an institution in NARS.
If your institution is a member of CeRA, you can access information through the
institutional route. Internet Protocol (IP) authentication is required for the institution.
A web-based application was developed for facilitating online access through CeRA,
using the URL: www.cera.jccc.in. For more information on CeRA, visit the site http://
cera.iari.res.in/index.php/en/.

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Weblinks

AGRIS - http://agris.fao.org/.
AGROVOC - http://aims.fao.org/standards/agrovoc/.
ArXiv.org - https://arxiv.org/.
Ask.com - http://www.ask.com/.
BASE - http://www.base-search.net/.
Bing - http://www.bing.com/.
BioRxiv - https://www.biorxiv.org/.
CAB Direct - http://www.cabdirect.org/.
CAB Thesaurus - https://www.cabi.org/cabthesaurus/.
CABI - https://www.cabi.org/.
CeRA - http://cera.iari.res.in/index.php/en/.
CeRA web-based application - www.cera.jccc.in/.
Chemical Abstracts - http://www.cas.org/.
CINAHL - https://health.ebsco.com/products/the-cinahl-database.
CiteSeerX - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/.
CiteULike - http://www.citeulike.org/.
Clarivate Analytics - https://clarivate.com/.
DOAJ - https://doaj.org/.
Dogpile - http://www.dogpile.com/.
DuckDuckGo - https://duckduckgo.com/.
eigenfactor.org - http://www.eigenfactor.org/.
Elsevier - https://www.elsevier.com/en-in/.
EMBASE - https://www.elsevier.com/.
Entrez - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gquery.
ERIC - https://eric.ed.gov/.
Excite - http://www.excite.com/.
FSTA - https://www.ifis.org/fsta.
Gibiru - http://www.gibiru.com/.
Google - http://www.google.com/.
Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com/.
HotBot - https://www.hotbot.com/.
Indian Academy of Sciences - http://www.ias.ac.in/.
ICAR - https://icar.org.in/.
ICAR e-journals - http://epubs.icar.org.in/ejournal/.
Indian Citation Index - http://www.indiancitationindex.com/.
Info.com - https://www.info.com/.
Infotopia - http://www.infotopia.info/.
Inspec - https://www.theiet.org/.
JCR (regular) - https://clarivate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Crv_JCR_FullMarketing-
List_A4_2018_v4.pdf.
JCR(first IF) - https://clarivate.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/CrvJCR_First-Impact-Factor-
List_2018_A4_v3.pdf.
Krishikosh - http://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/.
Master journal list - http://mjl.clarivate.com/.
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MedlinePlus - http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/.
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Microsoft Academic - https://academic.microsoft.com/.
NAAS rating - http://www.naasindia.org/rating.html.
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NALT - https://agclass.nal.usda.gov/.
NISCAIR - www.niscair.res.in/.
PubAg - https://pubag.nal.usda.gov/.
PubChem - http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.
Publish or perish - https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish.
PubMed - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/.
PubMed Central - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/.
PubPsych - https://www.pubpsych.eu/.
RePEc - http://www.repec.org/.
ResearchGate - https://www.researchgate.net/.
SciDev.Net - https://www.scidev.net/global/.
Science.gov - https://www.science.gov/.
ScienceDirect - http://www.sciencedirect.com/.
ScienceOpen - https://www.scienceopen.com/.
Scopus - http://www.scopus.com/.
Searx - https://searx.me/.
Slideshare - https://www.slideshare.net/.
Startpage.com - https://www.startpage.com/.
Swisscows - https://swisscows.com/.
TOXLINE - http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/.
Virtual LRC - http://www.virtuallrc.com/.
Web of Science - https://clarivate.com/products/web-of-science/.
WebCrawler - https://www.webcrawler.com/.
Wiki.com - http://wiki.com/.
Wikipedia - https://www.wikipedia.org/.
WorldWideScience.org - https://worldwidescience.org/.
Yahoo! - http://www.yahoo.com/.
Yandex - https://yandex.com/.
Yippy - https://yippy.com/.