You might be wondering what a database is and why you shouldn't just use a search engine, like Google, to find articles. While search engines like Google Scholar can help find literature, scholarly databases are like hitting the peer-reviewed literature jackpot. A scholarly database is essentially a collection of high-quality literature written by experts that comes from scholarly sources, such as peer-reviewed journals, books, conference proceedings, and reports. Databases allow users to perform more detailed searches, yielding a higher number of relevant results.
Looking for tips on how to search a scholarly database? Check out the Search the Literature section of our literature reviews guide.
Search a collection of crystal structure data of inorganic compounds recorded in the literature of the field from 1913-present