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        • Library guide to searching databases
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        • Searching the Library catalogue

Searching our databases

The Library subscribes to many different databases, which contain information from more than 30,000 journal titles, e-books, newspapers, websites, images, conference papers, standards, theses, handbooks and reference works.

You can access all of this content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via Search It, the main access point for our electronic resources. You can go directly to Search It, or use a shortcut for searching databases on the Library home page. As most databases are available by subscription only, you will need to login first with your NDS username and password.

Find It and CitationLinker are other useful tools for tracking down specific journal articles and electronic content.

Find out more about these tools by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page.

Types of Databases

There are a number of different types of databases available for your research:

• Full text databases provide the full-text of the article, which means you can download, email or print the entire document. You can often view the original page in PDF format.
• Bibliographic databases provide you with only basic citation details such as author, title, journal, volume/issue numbers, year and page numbers and an abstract (summary of the article). You then need to check the Library catalogue or use CitationLinker to track down a hardcopy of the journal article.
• Similar format databases are collections of a particular type or format, for example images, e-books, standards, statistics, etc.
• We have a small number of restricted access databases which are not available online. Visit the restricted access databases page to find out more.

Note, some databases have a mixture of full-text and bibliographic content. Often only the last few years are available in full-text and if you want to access older content you will have to track down the hard copy in the Library.