Physics and astronomy

Physical Review Online Archive

(PROLA). College Park: American Physical Society, 1997–. Indexes and provides full-text access to articles published in the most prominent series of physics research journals from 1893 to the most recent five years. The database includes abstracts of current articles; full text is available only with a library subscription.

INSPEC.

London: Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1903–. Provides abstracts of publications in physics, electrical engineering, electronics, communications, control engineering, computers and computing, and information technology.

AstroWeb: Astronomy/Astrophysics on the Internet

http://www.cv.nrao.edu/fits/www/astronomy.html. Offers links to publications and organizations in the field; to data from observations; and to information on topics such as radio, planetary, and solar astronomy.

Energy Citations Database

http://www.osti.gov/energycitations. Provides abstracts and, in some cases, links to full-text research publications in fields such as chemistry, physics, materials science, environmental science, geology, engineering, mathematics, and related disciplines. This database covers publications from 1948 to the present and is made available by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Information Bridge

http://www.osti.gov/bridge. A searchable database of full-text reports of research projects sponsored by the Department of Energy. Projects cover physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, environmental science, energy technologies, engineering, and renewable energy from 1995 to the present. The database is made available by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy.

NASA Astrophysics Data System

http://adswww.harvard.edu. A database of nearly 4 million abstracts of publications from journals, colloquia, symposia, proceedings, and internal NASA reports from 1993 to the present. The database covers astronomy and astrophysics, instrumentation, physics, and geophysics and includes preprints in astronomy. It is made available by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

(NASA) http://www.nasa.gov. Offers information for scientists and the public, including many visual resources and information about space missions.

Physics Reference Data

http://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/contents.html. Includes physical constants, atomic and molecular spectroscopy data, X-ray and gamma-ray data, and nuclear physics data. From the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

PhysicsWeb

http://physicsweb.org. News from the world of physics. Sponsored by the Institute of Physics, this site includes a Best of PhysicsWeb section with a selection of articles organized by subfield as well as a collection of resources for physicists and physics students.

PhysLink

http://www.physlink.com. A commercial site rich in news and general information. It contains links to reference sites and materials for physics teachers and students.

AIP Physics Desk Reference.

Ed. E. Richard Cohen, David R. Lide, and George L. Trigg. 3rd ed. New York: American Institute of Physics, 2003. A concise source of tables, formulas, and bibliographies in 22 subdisciplines related to physics, including acoustics, astronomy, biological physics, quantum physics, optics, fluid mechanics, and molecular spectroscopy. This work includes sections on “mathematical basics” and practical laboratory data.

Dictionary of Physics.

4 vols. London: Macmillan, 2004. An updated translation of Lexikon der Physik, this work provides brief, technical articles on a wide variety of topics in the field.

Dictionary of Pure and Applied Physics.

Ed. Dipak Basu. Boca Raton: CRC, 2001. Defines over 3,000 terms in acoustics, biophysics, medical physics, communication, electricity, electronics, geometrical optics, low-temperature physics, magnetism, and physical optics.

Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Ed. Paul Murdin. 4 vols. Bristol: Institute of Physics, 2001. Includes 700 long articles on topics and themes in the field as well as hundreds of shorter articles that define terms and provide profiles of people and institutions.

Macmillan Encyclopedia of Physics.

Ed. John S. Rigden. 4 vols. With supplements. New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996. Accessibly covers laws, concepts, fundamental theories, and the lives and work of important physicists throughout history.

The World of Physics: A Small Library of the Literature of Physics from Antiquity to the Present.

3 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. An anthology of key historical texts in physics, presented with informative introductory essays. This work is a useful collection of primary sources in the history of physics.