Yale University Library Research Guides: Paleontology Library Resources at Yale: Finding Journals

Open Access at Yale

Yale University Library supports many open access initiatives through membership fees. These include preprint servers like the arXiv and medRxiv, Knowledge Unlatched, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Reveal Digital, the Technical Report Archive & Image Library, and the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. Read more about our open access initiative support here.

Are you about to publish? Yale Library has agreements with some publishers that provide discounts when you publish with them. For PLOS and Cambridge University Press, the article processing charges to publish open access are completely waived. To learn more about your options and the details of our agreements, visit the library's guide to open access publishing support.

Guidelines on what the library supports and our strategy for choosing initiatives are available here.

Some of our databases have filters that allow you to see what is being published open access, including the Web of Science and Scopus. If you want to see what Yale authors have published under open access licenses, for example, do a search on Yale University using the Institution/Affiliation filter, then narrow down to open access in the results.

Database Quick List

Click on the "i" to see more information.

GeoRef GeoRef is the most comprehensive database in the geosciences, and it grows by at least 80,000 references a year. It includes journals, books, maps, and reports. The database also includes master's degree theses and doctoral dissertations from US and Canadian universities.
GeoScienceWorld Journals & eBooks GeoScienceWorld (GSW) is a one-stop shop and digital archive for earth science researchers. GSW provides electronic access to the journals and archives of more than 41 top-tier digital journals from 27 pre-eminent global publishers.
ProQuest Natural Sciences Collection This database combines the ProQuest Agricultural & Environmental Science Collection, the Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts, Biological Science Database, and Earth, Atmospheric & Aquatic Science Database into a single search platform, with coverage from 1946-present and robust, human-curated indexing. It will be particularly useful to researchers performing advanced searches, with time-saving search limits by keyword, author, author institution, and abstract. Its full-text resources range from scholarly journals, trade and industry journals, and technical reports to magazines, conference proceedings, and government publications. Notable items within the database are the Water Resources Abstracts, EIS: Digest of Environmental Impact Statements, Environmental Engineering Abstracts, Pollution Abstracts, Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts, and Toxicology Abstracts.
SciFinder A comprehensive tool, this database contains many abstracts with links to full-text articles. It also allows one to save references, substances' chemical structures, and to explore reactions. For tutorials on more than basic use, please check here or schedule an appointment with your librarian. Please note that you must create a free-to-you SciFinder account to search.
Scopus Scopus is a general abstract database. In addition to abstracts, it provides excellent tools for citation analysis for articles and authors, along with journal performance metrics.
Web of Science The Web of Science includes the Essential Science Indicators and Journal Citation Reports, two key ways for evaluating research performance by field. There are also citation analysis tools that you can use in Web of Science searches.

Theses and Dissertations

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) provides a very comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses and is the official digital dissertations archive for the Library of Congress. The database provides full text for most dissertations after 1997, and older materials that have not been digitized are available for purchase as printed copies.

Digital Treatise

Paleontological Society Digital Treatise
Digital Treatise provides subscription-based access to PDF files of all 51 previously published, hardcover volumes of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Volumes can be downloaded in their entirety or as individual chapters.

Article Analysis, Great Features, and Finding Authors

While a lot of papers appear in Google Scholar, the Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) is the best place to go if you want to:

Analyze articles' citation performance by author.
View the research performance of a department (usually best done by searching on addresses + institutions).
Discover which papers are associated with a particular grant.
View a two-way citation tree — or, papers cited by a paper plus papers citing a paper.

If you want metrics about social impact, Scopus is actually better — if an article has been shared frequently on social media, Scopus will have a page devoted to that. It also disambiguates authors via its author search (but for common names, it can get difficult and inaccurate).

This is an example of the Metrics (including social media mentions) page for a recently-published article, "On the history, osteology, and systematic position of the Wealden (Hastings group) dinosaur Hypselospinus fittoni (Iguanodontia: Styracosterna)." (2015). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 173(1), pp. 92-189.
Here's O.C. Marsh's author page (the primary one). You can also click View potential author matches to locate his name/affiliation variants to merge with this view. This is a very helpful feature for those working in interdisciplinary contexts.

The Journal Citation Reports (by Clarivate Analytics) will help you determine the performance of your journal articles — and find places where you can submit new papers. Paleontology is one of the categories. (If this tells you we don't have access, just refresh the page.)

Paleontology Library Resources at Yale: Finding Journals

Open Access at Yale

Database Quick List

Theses and Dissertations

Digital Treatise

Article Analysis, Great Features, and Finding Authors

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