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Library Services

Online Resources for Reading Lists

Why do I need to choose online library resources for my reading lists?

Online delivery of our academic programmes for 2021-2022 means that access to online library resources from reading lists is crucial for our students’ success.

This guide highlights some of our key online library resources across all faculty areas. It also provides information about some of the other things to consider when building your readings lists, to help make sure our students get immediate access to the resources that you have selected.

What online resources are available to me?

The below is just a selection of the resources on offer. To find more, please see the next question “Where do I go to find the online resources I need?"

Paid for Resources

Video

Box of Broadcasts

An archive of over 2 million television and radio recordings that can be used. Please note that BoB is accessible within the UK only.

Kanopy

A streaming service that has an archive of movies and documentaries that can be used.

Humanities and Social Sciences

JSTOR

Interdisciplinary, full-text scholarly articles, books, and primary sources. Coverage back to the first issue of journals; embargo on some current content. It is searchable by author and subject. Here is a tutorial on using JSTOR.

Project Muse

Project MUSE - Standard Collection Provides full-text access to over 300 journals in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

Sage Complete Reference Collection

Covers key topics in the social and behavioral sciences. Search or browse by subject area.

Statista

Provides statistical data from a wide range of international sources on populations, industries, economics, media, public opinion, companies, politics, lifestyles and many other topics. Here is a link to a video tutorial.

Gale Primary Sources

A humanities and social sciences digital primary sources archive that allows you to use a single cross- search interface to access 500 years of world history in multiple collections. Here are some tutorials and training.

Academic Search Complete

A multi-disciplinary database which provides full text for over 4,450 scholarly publications, more than 3,500 of them peer-reviewed. Access is provided via Senate House Library.

 

Sciences

Scopus

Multi-disciplinary database containing the citations and abstracts of peer-reviewed literature. This database lists the number of times a work has been cited in other works and provides direct links to the abstracts of citing works. Access to full-text subscription content where available at Queen Mary Library via the "library- check full text" button.

Science Direct

A leading full-text scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters from nearly 2,500 journals and more than 30,000 books, also covering life sciences.

Web of Science

Multi-disciplinary database containing the citations and abstracts of peer-reviewed literature. This database lists the number of times a work has been cited in other works and provides direct links to the abstracts of citing works. Access to full-text subscription content where available at Queen Mary Library via the "library- check full text" button.

BioOne

Database/Portal with more than 180 high quality, subscribed and open-access titles focused in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences.

Embase

Comprehensive journal and conference coverage across biomedicine. Contains citations and abstracts of peer-reviewed literature. Displays drug information.

IEEE Xplore Digital Library

A full-text access database which is primarily covering electronic engineering and computer sciences, however, it does also have resources potentially useful for biology students as it covers areas such as cancer detection and DNA sequences.

JoVE

Journal of Visualized Experiments is the first peer-reviewed scientific video journal.


General

Oxford Reference

An online resource that brings together two million digitized entries from OUP's Dictionaries, Companions, and Encyclopedias. Good for checking a fact or finding key information on a person, concept or term.

Taylor & Francis Evidence-Based Ebooks – VIVA

A collection of over 90,000 eBooks. Searchable at tile or chapter level. Browse by subject area.


Freely available resources


If you decide to use any of the images or texts, please make sure to follow the licence under which the material has been released


General

Open Educational Resources

A resource which provides teaching materials freely and openly for teachers and students.

SEARCH creative commons

A tool which allows you to search for images, music, video and media that is held under a creative commons license. You can specify whether you wish to modify, adapt, and build upon or, whether you want to use the item for commercial purposes.

Wikimedia commons

A large database of images, sounds and videos that are public domain and freely licensed.


Open Access Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

The Directory of Open Access Journals makes it possible to browse journals by subject. It is also possible to search within individual journal titles for articles on a specific topic

 

Open Access University Repositories

OpenDOAR

OpenDOAR portal links to global Open Access repositories

 

Queen Mary Open Access Information and Resources


Queen Mary Research Online

Queen Mary’s institutional repository providing open access to Queen Mary research

 

Other Open Access resources

DPLA: The Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America provides aggregated data from many libraries and archives. Some of the material is in the public domain while other items are licensed under copyright. If you decide to use material from this site please make sure it is licensed for your intended purpose

Project Gutenberg

A portal providing access to e-books, typically from the public domain


Subject-specific Open Access Resources

Science and Engineering

Selected Internet Resources -- Government Resources for Science Images and Video

The Library of Congress lists many American Open Access image banks

Trove: Gateway to online Australian resources: images, texts, videos and more.

Hosted by the National Library of Australia. Including digitised Australian newspapers

eLife

Founded in 2011 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust, this journal publishes research covering the life and biomedical sciences

Nucleic Acids Research

This journal publishes the results of research into physical, chemical, biochemical and biological aspects of nucleic acids and proteins involved in nucleic acid metabolism and/or interactions

Open Biology

Published by The Royal Society

PeerJ

PeerJ Has two peer-reviewed publications: PeerJ covering the Biological, Medical and Environmental Sciences, and PeerJ Computer Science. You can switch between the two on the journal homepage, underneath the search bar

PLOS

PLOS (Public Library of Science) publishes a range of open access journals within Science and Medicine

Wiley Open Access Journals

Publishes peer reviewed open access journals across biological, chemical and health sciences

 

Humanities and Social Sciences

Amsterdam University Press

Publishes most of their books and journals with an Open Access option (in addition to the print versions which are for sale.)

Anthropologi.info

Features an international list of repositories and collections of working papers with anthropological content. However, coverage includes a much broader range of the social sciences.

Humanities

An international, scholarly, peer-reviewed, open access journal for scholarly papers from all humanities disciplines. Humanities is published quarterly online by MDPI.

MIT Open Access Articles

The MIT Open Access Articles collection consists of scholarly articles written by MIT-affiliated authors that are made available through DSpace@MIT under the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy

National Academies Press

Provides almost all of their books as free pdfs.

The Open Access Directory

Hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, this directory offers comprehensive lists of Publishers of OA Books and Repositories by Discipline

Open Book Publishers

Provides high-quality, open access academic research in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Soc ArXiv / SocOpen

Open archive of the social sciences, provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints,and published papers, with the option to link data and code. SocArXiv is dedicated to opening up social science, to reach more people more effectively, to improve research, and build the future of scholarly communication. SocArXiv papers are moderated before appearing

Sociology Working Papers: Published by the Sociology Department at the University of Oxford
Project Muse Open Access Books


Medicine and Dentistry

BioMed Central

The research articles in all journals published by BioMed Central are Open Access. They are immediately and permanently available online without charge. A number of journals require an institutional or a personal subscription to view other content, such as reviews or paper reports. Free trial subscriptions to these journals are available

PubMed Central

Provided by the National Library of Medicine, contains over 2.2 million free full-text articles covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences

DPLA

The Digital Public Library of America gives you aggregated data from many libraries and Archives. Some of the material is in the public domain while other items are under various copyright licenses. Make sure if you decide to use material from this site that the item is licensed for what you want to do

Open I

Open I, the Open Access Biomedical Image Search Engine, allow you to search within a broad open access image repository

Open Library

An initiative which give you access to full-text resources (free after you sign up) which also include science related subjects

PLOS

Public Library of Science publishes a range of open access journals within Science and Medicine

Trove

Gateway to online Australian resources: images, texts, videos and more. Hosted by the National Library of Australia. Including digitised Australian newspapers.

Open Access Dental Journals

Provides links to a wide range of Open Access dental journals from the British Dental Association.

 

 

Where do I go to find the online resources I need?

• The Library maintains a Discovery Service

• The Library also maintain Subject Guides. These have been created for the various disciplines taught and researched at Queen Mary. The guides list e-books, databases, high-quality websites and other specialist electronic resources.

• Google Scholar is a useful resource for both paid for and freely available content.

 

How do I let the Library know which resources need to be purchased?

The best way to inform the Library of resources which need to be purchased is to create an online reading list and request for it to be reviewed. We are happy to show you how to carry out this process. This can be requested by sending an email to library-rlo@Queen Mary.ac.uk. However, even if you haven’t created an online reading list you can still send an email to library-acquisitions@Queen Mary.ac.uk if you need a resource purchased, and a member of the team will go through the options with you.

Please remember that books are purchased from your School’s book budget so your Library Rep might want you to check with him or her before spending this money.


What about copyright?

Most people don’t realize how much copyrighted material they can use with the licences which Queen Mary have and exceptions under the law- for example, you can often use scans of articles and video clips. For more information please see our copyright webpages or QMPlus module. If you have any questions, please send an email to library-copyright@Queen Mary.ac.uk.

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