Databases

Sabinet African Journals encompasses the breadth and depth of African research content by offering the most comprehensive, searchable collection of full-text African electronic journals available on one platform. Over 600 journal titles in 10 collections are available, including African Journal Archive, Business & Finance, Education, Juta's Law Journals, Labour, Law, Medicine & Health, Religion, Science Technology & Agriculture, and Social Sicences & Humanities. 

African government & law plus news resources, also curated by Sabinet, are available on Sabinet Discover. 

SAGE Journals has a portfolio that includes more than 1,100 journals, spanning the humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine. McMaster offers access to the full collection.

For open access (OA) publishing considerations, authors affiliated with McMaster can now publish in over 900 SAGE Choice journals with no article processing charges (APCs), and may receive a 40% discount on publication in SAGE’s Gold open access titles, with a small number of titles excluded. Please visit Library Support for Open Access for more information. 

Contains information on the full range of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods for the social and behavioral sciences, as well as many methods commonly used in the hard sciences, pulled from over 750 handbooks, encyclopedias, and journal articles. Supports researchers in every step of a research project, from writing a research question, choosing a method, gathering and analyzing data, to writing up and publishing the findings.

A digital library portal for researchers in astronomy and physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 14 million records covering publications in astronomy and astrophysics, physics, and the arXiv e-prints. Abstracts and full-text of major astronomy and physics publications are indexed and searchable. ADS also tracks also citations and usage of its records to provide advanced discovery and evaluation capabilities and provides access and pointers to a wealth of external resources, including articles available from publisher's websites, astronomical object information, data catalogs and data sets hosted by external archives. 

Contains over 50 million articles from over 23,000 full text journals covering many disciplines.

A multi-disciplinary science database that indexes over 6,000 journals from a variety of science disciplines. Database offers searching by topic, author, address, journal title, etc. and a Cited Reference search. Full text links are available for journals to which McMaster subscribes through the getit! link.

Provides online access to over 4,000 journals and 30,000 books published by Elsevier. Strong collections in the social sciences, pure and applied sciences, engineering, and medicine.  This service allows you to browse or search the journals and access full text articles (PDF & HTML).  McMaster has access to many, but not all titles at this site. 

SciFinder-n is a comprehensive source for chemical literature, searchable by topic, author, substances by name or CAS Registry Number, OR use the editor to draw chemical structures, substructures, or reactions. It provides access to new workflow solutions such as PatentPak™, MethodsNow™ and Retrosynthesis Planner as well as the core Chemical Abstracts Service databases available in classic SciFinder.  

Scitation is the online home of more than 100 journals from AIP (American Institute of Physics), APS, ASCE, ASME, SPIE, and a host of other prestigious science and engineering societies. Includes SPIN (Searchable Physics Information Notices) Web, a searchable database of physics, astronomy and engineering journals and conference proceedings.

Scopus provides broad indexing and citation coverage of academic journals, books and conference proceedings published worldwide. Delivering a comprehensive overview ofresearch output in the fields of science, engineering, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities, Scopus features smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research.

Based at the Allen Institute for AI, Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, which provides access to over 180 million research publications in all scientific domains. It applies artificial intelligence to extract the meaning from the scientific literature allowing scholars to navigate research much more efficiently than a traditional search engine.

Abstracts and indexes articles from more than 600 periodicals in both applied and theoretical aspects of the social sciences. Subjects include anthropology, criminology, economics, law, geography, policy studies, psychology, sociology, social work, and urban studies.

Citations, author abstracts and cited references from over 1,700 scholarly social sciences journals, and individually selected, relevant items from approximately 3,300 science and technology journals. Contains bibliographic information on all types of documents appearing in journals including articles, citations, letters, corrections, additions, excerpts, editorials and reviews. author abstracts available from 1992 forward

Information from these indexes can be retrieved by author, subject, journal title, address, or cited reference (or bibliography). Direct links to full-text from the full record display screen are provided only for journals published by the Academic Press, American Institute of Physics, Annual Reviews, Elsevier Science, IEEE, Kluwer, Nature Publishing Group, Royal Society of Chemistry, SIAM, Springer-Verlag and Wiley. For other journals, please check Get It! or the Library Catalogue to determine if we have a subscription to the journal.

Indexes current research focused on social work, human services, and related areas, including social welfare, social policy, and community development; covers over 1,406 serial publications; includes over 95,224 abstracts of journal articles and dissertations, and citations to book reviews.

Offers extensive coverage of more than 450 social work and human services journals dating back to 1965. Produced by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the database provides citations and abstracts dealing with all aspects of the social work field, including theory and practice, areas of service and social issues and problems.

The premiere database for locating articles in the field of sociology, Sociological Abstracts indexes some 1,800 international serial publications. Related disciplines include social and behavioral sciences, including anthropology, criminology, demography, education, law and penology, race relations, social psychology and urban studies.

This collection provides access to Sociological Abstracts in combination with other databases covering the international literature in sociology and social services, along with related fields. Together, it provides abstracts, indexing and full-text coverage of journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, and more, including full-text from hundreds of leading sociology journals.

Covers the international literature of sociology and social work, including relevant titles from related fields such as social policy, social care, social services, social anthropology, gender studies, gerontology, social psychology and population studies. It includes hundreds of full-text scholarly journals, as well as dissertations and other sources.

The most extensive database available on optics and photonics research, with more than 500,000 papers spanning biomedicine, communications, sensors, defense and security, manufacturing, electronics, energy, and imaging.  Our subscription includes conference proceedings from 1962 onwards, full-text for 10 journals, and some 200 e-books.

Some Proceedings volumes are not available online, either because they were not published, or because SPIE does not have the electronic rights. 

Comprehensive, bibliographic coverage of sport, fitness and related disciplines. This database contains well over 1.7 million records with journal and monograph coverage going back to 1800; over 22,000 dissertations and theses and reference to articles in 60 different languages.

SpringerLINK service offers full-text access to more than 3,000 e-journals (and other content types) covering disciplines in science, technology, health, engineering, environment, economics and law. McMaster has purchased the Springer Historical Archives with back issue coverage from v.1 onwards for most journals.

An international abstracting database covering key areas of women's and gender studies, indexing abstracts of articles from over 1,325 sources. The major focus is on education, employment, women in the family and community, medicine and health, female sex and gender role socialisation, social policy, the social psychology of women, female culture, media treatment of women, biography, literary criticism and historical studies. Both theoretical and empirical materials are abstracted..

Graphical abstracts of new developments in synthetic organic chemistry. Includes the most important reactions published in the recent scientific literature, presented as easy to read reaction schemes that are searchable by topic and reaction type. From the Royal Society of Chemistry.