Search Tools (Databases) By Subject

Coverage of international business including timely case studies, full-text articles, and robust data sets coupled with authoritative references and tools for analysis.

CABI’s dedicated database for practicing vets that facilitates access to evidence-based research. Contains over 2.1 million records (derived from CAB Abstracts). 

Database of biomedical and life sciences literature

Search/browse the UPEI Proquest Ebook Central e-book collection of over 250,000 books. Also discoverable in Publication Finder (for specific titles) and OneSearch.

Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)'s complete collection of publications, including Journals, Transactions, Magazines, Proceedings, and ACM Books. Also includes the "ACM Guide to Computing Literature", a comprehensive database of citation information on the field of computing.

Engineering journals, proceedings, and standards, from IEEE and IET

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. Access the Elsevier Scopus guide for information about searching. 

Actual business plans compiled by, and aimed at, entrepreneurs seeking funding for small businesses. 

Covidence is online software for managing the systematic review process. It facilitates the process of screening references (both title/abstract and full-text), conducting data extraction, completing risk of bias analysis and creating a PRISMA flowchart. Request invitation to join University of Prince Edward Island's Covidence account: https://tinyurl.com/2p92b4yw 

Access leading business and technical publications in the computer, telecommunications, and electronics industries.

RxFiles is an academic detailing program providing objective, comparative drug information to clinicians.  RxFiles also includes newsletter reviews, Q&As, trial summaries, and up-to-date drug comparison charts.  [description from database website]

New instructions as of February 2024 on how to use the mobile app with UPEI's subscription enabled: 

Semantic Scholar is a free database of millions of scholarly publications in the fields of computer science and neuroscience. Most of the indexed content is open access, although some content may require use of Interlibrary Loan to get the full text.

As a joint project of Microsoft, Google, and Baidu, it offers a significantly more sophisticated search engine than Google Scholar for these fields including advanced filters designed specifically for those knowledge domains.

This collection of over 450 streaming videos on the SAGE Research Methods platform offers support on the practical skills that you need to successfully complete your research. Key areas such as writing a research proposal, planning and designing a research project, and securing ethical approval are explicitly covered. Practical skills such as project management, writing for publication, presenting work, and building networks are also presented through helpful explanatory videos.

SAGE Research Methods Foundations is a large series of extended articles/short books edited by Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont, Alexandru Cernat, Joseph W. Sakshaug & Richard A. Williams. It is the perfect companion for novice researchers and provides bite-size, introductory overviews to all the major methods topics to help get you on your way.

Part of RePEc, EconPapers provides access to Research Papers in Economics, the worlds largest collection of online Economics working papers, journal articles, and software.

Wiley Online is a multidisciplinary collection of online resources covering life, health and physical sciences, social science, and the humanities. The Library subscribes to a large subset of the journals published by Wiley, but not all of them. As of Winter 2019, the Library also provides access to over 20,000 Wiley ebooks, which is most but not all of them. The Library is unable to provide access to Wiley Textbooks.

Backfile thru December 2009 for Web of Science (WOS) Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) & Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI)

Why just the backfile? See the Web of Science Subscription 2010.

Analyze important global issues and events through topic overviews, international viewpoints, news, and multimedia content.

Containing over 15 million records, Inspec is one of the most definitive abstract and indexing databases for subject specific and interdisciplinary research in the fields of engineering, physics and computer science. The Inspec database covers five main topics: physics; electrical engineering and electronics; computers and control; information technology for business; and mechanical and production engineering.

Understand the activities of companies and industries worldwide through leading business and trade publications. Updated daily.

Searches scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and articles. Note: only use the proxied link when you are off-campus. If you are on campus, go directly to Google Scholar as http://scholar.google.ca.

Search millions of articles covering all aspects of communications, including advertising, public relations, and more.

Discover well-rounded coverage of both the historical and current state of affairs in the hospitality and tourism industries.

Across the web, there are millions of datasets about nearly any subject. Dataset Search has indexed almost 25 million of these datasets, giving you a single place to search for datasets and find links to where the data is. 

More links to free datasets

Provides access to archival issues of over 4,500 scholarly journals across most academic disciplines. Includes primary source materials.

The collections are the following: Arts & Sciences I to XV, Business IV, Hebrew Journals, Ireland, Life Sciences, Lives of Literature, Public Health, Security Studies, Sustainability, Global Plants, Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa, World Heritage Sites: Africa, and 19th Century British Pamphlets.

Statistical data by country. Site encourages you to create a free login but you don't need to do that to access the data - just use the Data or Infographics menus at the top of the home page.

This link goes to the public version of the New York Times. Robertson Library does not have a paid license to this site.
The Library does have full text access to recent NYT issues via the Gale databases (1985 - present, may be delayed by one business day).

Oxford journals (about 240) and ebooks purchased from Oxford. This does NOT include the Oxford English Dictionary which is on its own platform.

Ideal for business schools and entrepreneurs, Small Business Collection is updated daily and provides insights, tips, strategies, and success stories. Users find more than 500 subject-appropriate, active, full-text periodicals, including: Beverage Industry, Black Enterprise, Economist, Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, HR Magazine, Real Estate Weekly, Restaurant Business, Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, And more.

Integrates data on over 60,000 topics from over 18,000 sources onto a single professional platform. Categorized into 21 market sectors, Statista.com provides companies, business customers, research institutions, and the academic community with direct access to quantitative data on media, business, finance, politics, and a wide variety of other areas of interest or markets.

"Free and open access to global development data", with browse features by country or socio-economic indicator.

Includes a significant collection of population data at the subnational level.

Key events and people, political, social, and cultural, for the USA in the 20th century and 2000-2009.

A collection of more than two thousand primary sources on American history and culture.

Covers more than 600 Native American groups, through videos and slideshows, images, biographies of key people, event and topic entries, primary sources, maps and graphs, and timelines.

Contains biographical and critical essays on the work of important American writers. Presents scholar-signed essays prepared by experts in the field.

ArtStor is a collection of images of art across many cultures and times. UPEI does not subscribe to the main database, but a significant portion is freely available to all as the Public Collections.

The definitive index for religious and theological literature. Covers all aspects of theology and world religions. ATLA provides some useful short video tutorials including "Three Methods to Search For Biblical Scripture Citations".

Contains citations for books, essays, journal articles and government documents of the United States and Canada pertaining to native North Americans, including culture, history and daily life. Useful for researching the contributions, struggles and issues surrounding North America's indigenous peoples. An EBSCO product, also included in OneSearch Full.

Description provided by the database publisher, Gale/Cengage:

Biography and Genealogy Master Index enables users to locate biographical entries contained in more than 1,000 volumes and editions of important current and retrospective biographical reference sources. This index contains citations that point to over 15 million biographies on nearly 5 million people, living and deceased, from all time periods, geographical locations, and fields of endeavor.

Covers writers who have made significant contributions to British, Irish, and Commonwealth literature from the fourteenth century to the present day. Includes in-depth critical and biographical analysis.

Part of the Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) program of statistical tools from Statistics Canada; provides access to Canadian Census Profile Tables by Census Geography and by Census Year; Microdata Files; and Postal Code Conversion Files.

This database lets you access 153 years of patent descriptions and images. You can search, retrieve and study more than 2,480,000 patent documents.

The Catholic Research Resources Alliance website has two resources of note: Catholic Portal, which allows users to identify items in a wide variety of research collections, and Catholic News Archive, a text-searchable collection of over 30,000 issues of Catholic newspapers with a focus on dioceses in the United States.

Full text encyclopedic articles from Children's Literature (vols published from 2004 - 2014).

The Cochrane Library, owned by Cochrane and published by John Wiley & Sons., is a collection of databases that contain different types of high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making. The Library includes the following:

Ei Compendex is the broadest and most complete engineering literature database available in the world with over 20 million indexed records from 77 countries across 190 engineering disciplines. Every record is carefully selected and indexed using the Engineering Index Thesaurus

Biographical information about authors. Collection includes Contemporary Authors (CA) v. 206-348 and Contemporary Authors New Revision (CANR) v. 114-264

Contemporary Black Biography provides informative biographical profiles of the important and influential persons of African heritage who form the international black community

Provides biographical information on important figures in today's musical arena, covering artists working in all genres of modern music, including rock, jazz, pop, rap, rhythm and blues, folk, New Age, country, gospel and reggae.

Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television
Biographical and career information on people currently working in the entertainment industry. For general and trade audiences.

The online version of the Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties, which is the Canadian standard for drug monographs contains thousands of products, including:

CBC news and documentary videos, commercial free, streaming

Dictionary of Literary Biography contains biographical and critical essays on the lives, works and careers of the world's most influential literary figures, over 16,000 articles.

Ebook reading app is available for mobile devices.

Note that most but not all ebooks may be downloaded - this is decided by the individual book publishers.

A multicultural biographical source that covers notable individuals from every part of the world and from all time periods who have made significant contributions to human culture.

English Historical Documents Online contains over 5,500 expertly indexed and fully searchable British history primary documents from 500-1914. Type "AND" between keywords.

Quickly access articles from a database of scholarly journals and other trusted periodicals. Best for academic research.

Search across many subject encyclopedias and other handbooks.

Access general interest magazines and key serials in a single resource. Best for general research.

Search a full range of health-related issues, from current disease and disorder information to alternative medical practices. New periodical and newspaper articles are added daily.

Introductory topic and research information for lower undergraduate term papers on a wide variety of popular topics.

Find overviews, news, and opinions on hundreds of today's important social issues.

Understand context for hundreds of science topics through overviews, journals, news, interactive experiments, and more.

Uncover information on hundreds of the most significant people, events, and topics in U.S. history from a variety of sources.

Uncover information on hundreds of the most significant people, events, and topics in world history from a variety of sources.

A master index to every literary series published by The Gale Group. The Library has some of these in Gale Virtual Reference Library online and some in print.

Literature Resource Center offers up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world.

Quickly access reviews of books, periodicals, books on tape, and electronic media representing a wide range of interests.

Access literary works and authors throughout history, including full-text poems, plays, short stories, speeches, and more.

A multidisciplinary collection of full text articles, with topic browsing tools.

Access current and authoritative periodical content covering agriculture and its related fields.

Find timely and historically relevant content on issues that influence women’s lives across the globe.

Comprehensive periodical content for researchers studying law, law enforcement, forensic science, terrorism, and more.

Find a variety of information from major cooking and nutrition magazines as well as key reference titles.

Access a range of periodical content to explore cultural differences, contributions, and influences in the global community.

Discover content useful for starting a business, marketing a product, developing policy, analyzing trends, and more.

Gain insight on issues in administration, funding, and policy. Best for educators, administrators, and education students.

Analyze business insights, tips, strategies, and success stories. Updated daily. Best for business schools and entrepreneurs.

Investigate environmental issues with diverse perspectives from the scientific community, policymakers, and corporate interests.

Search millions of articles about drama, music, art history, and filmmaking. Diverse resource for serious fine arts students.

Find millions of articles on the practical and scientific aspects of horticulture studies. For all horticultural enthusiasts.

Discover balanced coverage of topics related to gender studies, family and marital issues, and more.

Find up-to-date information on a range of health care topics. Best for students, researchers, and health care professionals. More than 2,500 embargo-free, full-text periodicals, reference books, pamphlets, and hundreds of videos demonstrating medical procedures and live surgeries.

Access articles covering all aspects of managing and maintaining information and technology, including library science. Updated daily.

Search across full-text Spanish- and Portuguese-language scholarly journals and magazines from and about Latin America.

Provides indexing for more than 1,200 major law reviews, legal newspapers, specialty publications, Bar Association journals, and international legal journals, including more than 200 titles in full text. 

Search scholarly journals, magazines, and reports covering all aspects of past and present military affairs. Updated daily.

Access major U.S. and international newspapers and news broadcast transcripts online to search articles instantly by title, headline, date, or other fields. Over 200 Canadian newspapers included.

Research full-text titles cited in CINAHL and other resources to support specialized care, treatment, and patient management.

Access academic journals and magazines covering the fields of physical therapy, physical fitness, and sports medicine.

Access scholarly journals and magazines that both analyze and contribute to popular culture.

Find authoritative periodical content supporting research in all fields of psychology.

Research the impact of religion on culture throughout history, including literature, arts, and language. Updated daily.

Search balanced coverage of events in U.S. history. Best for novice historians and academic researchers. Updated daily.

Research a vocation, find an appropriate institution of learning, and get assistance on job searches and maintaining a career.

Gain valuable insight into conflicts and their causes, impact, and perception on a global scale.

Access balanced coverage of events in world history and scholarly work being established in the field.

Full text biographies, literary criticism, authors, writers, musicians, famous people (American and world)

Search healthevidence.org for access to 3,853 quality-rated systematic reviews evaluating the effectiveness of public health interventions. We search the published literature and compile public health relevant reviews -- eliminating your need to search and screen individual databases. Use of the database requires registration which is free.

Contains the full text (with PDF page images) of Canadian and US law-related documents, as well as some special collections of documents including Women and the Law primary historical documents.

Help Guides (Searching, Getting Started, full User Guide)

The Canadian core collection includes the following:

Featuring more than 160 ebooks and a range of videos, the Human Kinetics Library is a comprehensive digital platform dedicated to the research, teaching, and understanding of the kinesiology and exercise science disciplines. The Library's subscription includes the Core Collection

Primary historical documents relating to the historical experiences, cultural traditions and innovations, and political status of indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada

This innovative full-text newspaper resource allows users to search articles instantly by title, headline, date, author, newspaper section, or other fields. InfoTrac Newsstand provides access to more than 2,300 major U.S. regional, national, and local newspapers, as well as leading titles from around the world. It also includes thousands of images, radio and TV broadcasts and transcripts.

The Indigenous Studies Portal (iPortal) is a database of full-text electronic resources such as books, articles, theses and documents as well as digitized materials such as photographs, archival resources, maps, etc. focusing primarily on First Nations and Aboriginals of Canada with a secondary focus on North American materials and beyond.

IslandScholar is the institutional database for scholarly publications, including theses, by the UPEI community. It is a project of the UPEI Robertson Library and is part of the Virtual Research Environment project and uses the Islandora software.

Over 26,000 videos, a combination of documentaries and feature films.

Faculty should contact their subject librarian to arrange access to a video if not previously licensed within the last year. Due to budget constraints, Kanopy videos will only be licensed if the faculty member intends to require them for viewing for a specific course. They should provide the librarian with the course name, number, and semester when it will be required.

Le Petit Robert is a French dictionary (NOT a French-English translation dictionary)

• 60 000 mots, 300 000 sens, 185 000 exemples d’emplois [60,000 words, 300,000 definitions, 185,000 usage examples]
• L’étymologie, la phonétique, les synonymes et contraires, les expressions et proverbes [Etymology, phonetics, synonyms and antonyms, expressions and sayings]
• 35 000 citations de 1 300 auteurs [35,000 quotations from 1,300 authors]

Full text of a select set of engineering-related standards as requested by engineering faculty from ASME, ASTM, and BSI.

Also includes over 6,000 standards provided for free, mostly from US states and US federal agencies.

Contains bibliographic information and abstracts of health-related articles, reports, surveys, and other resource documents pertaining to the health and health care of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Nations. The database provides information for the benefit, use, and education of organizations and individuals with an interest in health-related issues, programs, and initiatives regarding North American indigenous peoples. [Description from database website]

Full text news sources from around Canada and the world. Includes the two PEI newspapers, the Charlottetown Guardian and the Summerside Journal-Pioneer.

Provides streaming access to films produced by the National Film Board.

Nursing and Health Professions Premier Collection is composed of about 100 core nursing and related health scholarly journals, published by Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins and hosted on the search platform Ovid.

All of these titles are fully indexed in the CINAHL database and are also searchable within the OneSearch platform, so we recommend you use one of those search engines for topic searching rather than the Ovid platform directly.

Established in 2007, Odesi (Open Data Documentation, Extraction Service and Infrastructure) is a digital repository for social science data, including polling data. It is a web-based data exploration, extraction and analysis tool that uses the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) social science data standard. The datasets in Odesi are available to individuals affiliated with member and subscribing institutions.  However, anyone can use the <odesi> search functionality and freely available metadata to identify datasets of interest to them.

PEDro is a free database of over 28,000 randomised trials, systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines in physiotherapy.

Public Health + comes to you via the McMaster Health Knowledge Refinery. Every article from over 120 medical and allied health academic journals is critically appraised to identify those that are methodologically sound. Articles that pass this process are rated (maximum 7) by clinicians for relevance and newsworthiness, and are then sent to this website. The articles are updated weekly and a searchable archive is kept on this website.

SAGE Research Methods supports beginning and advanced 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.

SciFinder, produced by the Chemical Abstracts Service, is the major index of the chemical literature. It is searchable by chemical structure, chemical name, CAS Registry Number, molecular formula, chemical reaction, research topic, author name, company name, and CA abstract number or patent number.

You must create an individual account before using SciFinder.

SCOAP³ is the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. It is an intermediary repository for gold open-access articles that will also appear on the publishers' sites and on arXiv. It is specific to the field of High-Energy (Particle) Physics. 

Keywords: SCOAP, SCOAP3

SSRN is an open access research platform used to share early-stage research, evolve ideas, measure results, and connect scholars around the world. Provides early access to scholarship by publishing article abstracts and full-text access to preprints/working papers for over 1.4 million articles from most academic fields, not just the social sciences. 

Some full text content requires paid subscription but most is free, but may require free account registration. 

Description from producer (JSTOR) as of Jan 2020:

Nearly 450,000 page images in the collection!

Part of the Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) program of statistical tools from Statistics Canada.

Provides full text access to Canadian theses from 1998 onwards held by the National Library of Canada & bibliographic information on theses from 1965.

See also Proquest Open Access Dissertations and Theses and Open Access Theses and Dissertations (both of these are worldwide search tools, not just for UPEI theses)

TRID (Transport Research International Documentation) is the world's largest and most comprehensive bibliographic resource on transportation research information.

TRID covers all modes and disciplines of transportation and contains more than 1.4 million records of published research.  More than 422,000 records contain links to full-text documents.

Authority files are a way of bringing together all of the different names for a person, place, organization, etc. to help researchers find everything connected to that term.

Examples of variant names that an authority file helps with are: