Bibliographic databases collect and index bibliographic data on a range of publications. Such databases are indispensable when searching for publications by specific authors or on specific topics, since normal search machines like Google only search a small part of the internet (see the Wikipedia entry on the "Deep Web").
Bibliographic data includes information that aids in the identification of individual publications. For books, this might be the author, title, edition, place of publication, publisher and year of publication. For journal articles, this is the author, title of the article, title of the journal, volume number, year of publication and page rage of the article within the journal.
Some bibliographic databases only contain bibliographic data, meaning the full text of the book or article must be found elsewhere by using, for example, the library catalogue(INFO 6) or the E-journal Library(INFO 16). Some bibliographic databases, however, also contain full texts.
These databases can be accessed by clicking on "Databases" on the University Library homepage. This leads to an information page, a "database of databases". You can either enter the name of specific database in the search field, or use the “subject overview”. Making these databases available campus-wide is in some cases very expensive, therefore we have chosen key databases that should be universally relevant. If you cannot find the database you are looking for, please let us know.
| Media Sci. | Econ. + Law | Comp. Sci. | Engineering | Natural Sci. | Mathematics | Special features | |
| ACM Digital Library | X | X | X | Full texts | |||
| Beck-online | X | Full texts | |||||
| Business Source Premier | X | Full texts, Thesaurus, Citations | |||||
| Comm. and Mass Media Complete | X | Full texts, Thesaurus, Citations | |||||
| EconBiz | X | Full texts, Thesaurus | |||||
| IEEE Xplore Digital Library | X | X | X | Full texts, Citations | |||
| Juris | X | Full texts | |||||
| Nautos | X | X | DIN Standards, VDI Standards | ||||
| Nexis Uni | X | X | Full texts | ||||
| SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts) | X | X | Data collection | ||||
| Scopus | X | X | X | X | X | X | Citations |
| SPIE Digital Library | X | X | Full text | ||||
| Statista | X | X | X | Statistical data | |||
| Web of Science | X | X | X | X | X | X | Citations |
| Zentralblatt MATH | X | X | MSC (Mathematical subject classification) |
Bibliographic databases are maintained by different organisations and have, therefore, quite different interfaces. The presentation of data and the search tools differ greatly from database to database. Each database usually has a detailed page of information on how to use it. Please do not give up if using a database is complicated and feel free to ask library staff for help. It is part of our job to assist you.
You can contact the information desk at any time:
+49 3677 69-4531
Subject-specific information is provided by the subject librarians. You can find an overview of the subject librarians on the homepage of the UB Ilmenau under: "About us" -> "Contact persons".