LibGuides: Free Public SciTech Resources: Search Tools

Search Tools

Google Scholar
Google Scholar covers all subject areas.

Search Tools allow you to find articles by subject, author, keyword, or often other parameters. These are some of the best free tools. Please note that in most cases you will not be able to directly access the full text of articles you find, but will need to retrieve them from one of the open-access journal sites or from your library. The "Information by Subject" tab of this guide has a more comprehensive listing of search tools for different subject areas.

Science.gov
This is the U.S. Government's science portal. You can search multiple federal research indexes or link out to different agencies.
PubMed
PubMed is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 24 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to over 3 million full text articles and other related resources.

NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Chemistry Portal
Chemistry resources covering such topics as Chemical Analysis, Chemical Engineering & Processing, Classical Analytical Chemistry, Forensics, Gas Metrology, Inorganic Analytical Chemistry, Microfluidics, Nuclear Analytical Chemistry, Organic Analytical Chemistry, Spectroscopy, Standard Reference Data, and Standard Reference Materials.
NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Physics Portals
Physics research at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) includes everything from improving the safety of medical radiation procedures to developing future "quantum information" technologies that generate unbreakable codes. NIST provides the measurements, standards, and technical expertise scientists and industries need to push the limits of the fundamental properties of nature.
PubChem
FREE resource. PubChem provides information on the biological activities of small molecules. It is a component of NIH's Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative. PubChem includes substance information,compound structures, and bioactivity data in three primary databases, PCSubstance, PCCompound, and PCBioAssay, respectively. PCSubstance contains more than 12 million records; PCCompound contains more than 8 million unique structures; PCBioAssay contains more than 300 bioassays. Each bioassay contains a various number of data points.

CiteSeer
CiteSeer is a scientific literature digital library focusing on computer and information science. CiteSeer provides citation indexing for each article, which allows you to see (a) all the references cited by the article, and (b) what other articles have cited the article.

Zentralblatt MATH
Zentralblatt MATH covers mathematics. It displays only a limited number of results for free, but is still useful.

Publisher Websites

SciVerse (Elsevier)
SciVerse covers all subject areas

Many publishers of scientific and technical information allow you to search their content for free, even though they don't allow you to read their articles or papers for free. The following is a list of major scientific and technical publishers that allow free searching but not free access to the content.

MetaPress (Springer)
MetaPress covers all subject areas.
Wiley Online Library
Wiley Online Library covers all subject areas.

Scitation
SciTation covers all areas of science and technology.

IEEE Xplore
IEEE Xplore covers electrical engineering, computer engineering, biomedical engineering, and physics.
ACM Digital Library
ACM Digital Library covers computer science and information technology.

Books

IIT Library Catalog
Begin your book search here

These are some free search tools for finding books. Books are seldom available for free due to copyright, unless they were published more than 90 years ago.

Chicago Public Library

Google Book Search
Google Book Search allows you to search the full text of books that have been scanned and digitized by Google or the publisher. If the book is in the public domain, a PDF copy may be downloaded.

WorldCat
WorldCat is the most comprehensive book search tool in the world. Using WorldCat you will be able to find nearly every book on your topic, but some titles may be difficult to obtain.