Library

Find journal articles, newspaper articles, book reviews etc.

Note: the search above won't find every article, for a more comprehensive search see the information below on databases.

To find relevant and good quality information for your work, searching databases is the most effective method. You have free access to a range of searchable databases though you may need your username and password to use some of them. Databases contain quality-assessed journal or newspaper articles on particular topics.

Databases

• Databases for Physics (complete listing) / Key databases for Physics (selected listing)
• Databases for Astronomy

For help using specific databases - see guides which are found by clicking on the "Full details of this resource" link on individual database records on the databases lists.

Internet sites

Internet sites for Physics

• Physics World (Institute of Physics) - News, articles, resources and details of events from the Institute of Physics.
• PhysLink - Physics & Astronomy Online - The site provides access to physics and astronomy news, links to relevant reference resources etc.. Note that this is a commercial site ; however, the site is maintained by a volunteers working in the areas of physics and astronomy.
• PhysNet - PhysNet is a 'worldwide physics departments and documents network'. The site includes links to physics departments and institutes worldwide, a search facility covering material such as pre-prints and reports, as well as links to other relevant physics related sites. The site is overseen by the European Physical Society.
• The WWW Virtual Library: Physics - Key web sites in various areas of Physics recommended by experts as being of high quality.
• European Physical Society - The EPS site provides access to Europhysics News which offers short articles on a range of general physics topics.

Internet sites for Astronomy

• Royal Astronomical Society - The web site of the UK's leading professional body for astronomy and astrophysics. The site includes news. Particularly useful is Astronomy in the UK, a review of British astronomy and space science. The site also has a useful list of general Astronomy and Astrophysics links.

You might find some resources useful for your dissertation which we don't have available from this Library.

• Use our Inter Library Loan service to order books and journal articles

A general introduction to referencing is available.

Referencing and citing – using your sources

What is referencing?

Referencing is the acknowledgement of items you have read and used while creating a written piece of work for your essay, dissertation, article or thesis.

It is important to keep an exact and complete record of the details of all the sources of information that you use for coursework, essays, dissertations or publications. Sources can include books, journal articles, web pages and legal cases. If you don’t keep a precise record you will have difficulty (and a lot more work) when you need to list the sources in your reference list.

Citations

When writing an essay, report or dissertation, it is usual to cite [mention] the sources that you used, referred to, or took quotes from. These references might describe journal or newspaper articles, books, government reports, web pages

Citing accurate references is important for the following reasons:

• To give credit to concepts and ideas from other authors
• To provide evidence of the extent of your reading
• To use other work to support the arguments you make
• To allow the user to locate the cited references easily
• To help you avoid plagiarism

Which style of referencing does the School of Physics & Astronomy use?

There are many styles for references, however, the most commonly used styles are Harvard (a version using author/date format) and Vancouver (numbered format).  

See Harvard referencing guide from Leeds University

Software for managing your references

There are a number of reference management software programs which help you to record and store references to books or journal articles and many other sources while you are working on a project. You can then use the stored information to generate bibliographies for your essay, thesis or article using a wide range of styles. The University supports EndNote. There are also a number of freely available pieces of reference management software.