LibGuides: Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics: Literature Search

Top Astronomy Databases & Repositories

ADS (Astrophysics Data System)
The ADS maintains three bibliographic collections containing more than 15 million records covering publications in astronomy and astrophysics, physics, and general science, including all arXiv e-prints. Abstracts and some full-text of major astronomy and physics publications are indexed and searchable. ADS is free to all. To access full text of UT’s subscribed content, register for a user account and choose UT Austin from the list of institutions.

arXiv.org This link opens in a new window
Primary preprint server for physics and related disciplines, often the first stop for finding papers. Astrophysics section: astro-ph.
Created by Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico and launched in 1991, arXiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov) is a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers. Areas covered include physics and related disciplines, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computational linguistics, and neuroscience.
INSPEC This link opens in a new window
Primary index for literature in physics, as well as computer and electrical engineering. It covers over 4500 current journals as well as ArXiv preprints and conferences. See information about Inspec's astronomical indexing.
Updated weekly. Indexes the research literature of physics; electrical engineering and electronics; & computers and control. Offers over 15 million records and strong international coverage. The archive portion, which was formerly separate, is now integrated with the current file.

NASA PubSpace
NASA's designated public access repository. It is a collection of NASA-funded scholarly publications within the STI Repository, aiming to increase access to federally funded research in accordance with NASA Public Access Policy.
NTRS - NASA Technical Reports Server
The NASA STI Repository (also known as the NASA Technical Reports Server, NTRS) provides access to NASA metadata records, full-text online documents, images, and videos. The types of information included are conference papers, journal articles, meeting papers, patents, research reports, images, movies, and technical videos – scientific and technical information (STI) created or funded by NASA.
ARIBIB
Astronomisches Rechen-Institut BIBliographical Database for Astronomical References: a historical bibliography of astronomy literature up to 2000, based on various printed indexes.

General Literature Search

Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Indexes over 12,000 journals across all the scientific fields.
Updated weekly. The Web of Science Core Collection is a group of databases (Science Citation Index Expanded, 1900-present; Social Sciences Citation Index, 1900-present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present) that together cover more than 21,000 journals across all disciplines. The Emerging Sources Citation Index (2005-present) tracks thousands of additional journals that are being considered for inclusion in the main citation indexes. Other files track references from conference proceedings (1990-present) and citations to books (2005-present).
The Web of Science platform currently also provides temporary access to several databases that are not part of the Core Collection, including Biosis Citation Index, Data Citation Index, and Zoological Record.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Dates of coverage vary. Unlimited users.
Google Scholar uses the popular Google search engine to enable searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar includes full text and citations.
Use this link to access Google Scholar, and see our Google Scholar Guide for information on using this resource.
If you encounter a warning about the security certificate when using the FindIt@UT tool in Google Scholar, you can learn more about that using this guide.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
A general database with wide coverage of academic and popular literature, such as newspapers, magazines, etc. Good for discovering opinion pieces or journalism sources that might discuss the impact of astronomy on society. This includes recent years of Scientific American, New Scientist, and Astronomy magazine, among other popular science magazines.
Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.