Schools subject A-Z

Click here to for information on our schools service.

Pupils should be aware that the resources we have are not necessarily appropriate to their level and many of our books and journals are in foreign languages. Before making a visit we would recommend that you consult Primo to see what is available.

Due to contractual licensing agreements we regret that we are not allowed to give you access to our e-resources or our network.

Better use of the Web

As everyone will tell you, there is a lot of rubbish on the Web. Anyone can "publish". Much is factually incorrect, biased, badly written and more often than not, at the wrong level for your assignments.

Your work can be marked down by external examiners if you use inappropriate Web sites. Freely available encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are not necessarily the best web sites to mention in your bibliography.

The Virtual Training Suite produced by Intute, has a discipline specific guide to best practice on the the Web

Plagiarism & copyright

You must acknowledge what you have made use of in your studies, whether it is print or web based. We have a handout that describes how best to cite books, articles, newspapers, web sites etc.

A good, freely available, guide to using the Web effectively and avoiding its many pitfalls is the Internet Detective. It covers the range of Web resources , how to evaluate what you find, how to cite and how to cope with copyright and plagiarism issues.

Free journals/books

Free Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals
This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. They aim to cover all subjects and languages.

Google Scholar
Not everything is full-text by any means. Not clear what is available. However it has some wonderful material on it for free. Well worth trying and it is growing all the time.

Highwire
It claims to be the world's largest free full-text repository for scientific articles -around 2.1 million articles

PubMed Central
PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 24million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles. There are over 1.8million full text articles

Scirus
Science only. Based on Elsevier's own journal output with selected other publishers. 410 million citations.

Free books

e-Book collection
Particularly good for history, Literature and Modern Studies

Project Gutenberg
nearly 20,000 books that are out of copyright, no nothing up-to-date. Useful for those doing literature.

Subject gateways

Intute
No longer updated from July 2011. Over 110,000 quality web sites arranged by discipline.

British Academy
Anything but Science

BUBL
No longer updated from April 2011. A long standing gateway with a directory approach.

PInakes
A gateway to gateways

WWW Virtual Library
A lot of US based material.