Alumni accessible databases

This list includes licensed, open access, and freely accessible databases that provide scholarly articles, consumer publications, business reports, and government documents that Virginia Tech alumni can access.

This subject category lists recommended databases covering engineering and the physical sciences: chemistry, geosciences, mathematics, physics, and statistics. Many provide full-text sources, otherwise use the citations they provide to request copies via your local library's interlibrary loan service.

arXiv.org from Cornell University
ArXiv is a highly-automated electronic, open archive and distribution server for research articles in engineering and the physical sciences. Full text available in a variety of formats, including PDF, HTML, and PS.
ASCE Civil Engineering Database
The Civil Engineering Database (CEDB) indexes citations for all ASCE publications. The database covers all the journals, conference proceedings, books, standards, manuals, magazines, and newspapers published by ASCE. Journal papers with abstracts go back to 1970. Non-abstract journal records go back to 1958. The book records are complete dating back to the early 1900s.
SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System
NASA Astrophysics Data System provides full-tesxt conference papers in PDF, PostScript, and scanned image formats.
National Climatic Data Center
The National Climatic Data Center provides data sets on climate and weather, plus full-text publications in PDF that summarize this data. Free access to some data sets requires connecting from a campus computer or through Off Campus Sign In.
Online access is free for .gov, .edu, .mil, .k12, .us and other selected domains and many products listed here are free for all users. See the Free Access section of the NCDC Help page for detailed information.
Period of record shown indicates period of data available online. The period of record for the complete data set may vary and is dependent on the desired location. Data prior to the period of record indicated may be available. The NCDC archives contain data as far back as the 1800s for certain data typesand locations. Contact the NCDC for availability, pricing and ordering information.
Any data product ordered from NCDC may be certified for court, but only the more commonly certified products can be certified for court online. For ordering certified copies of items where certifications are not offered online, please contact the NCDC. For more information, please see the note on certifications on our NCDC Ordering page.
Online means available through our web site for electronic delivery, although some items ordered online may require online delivery by mail and those are subject to a service charge. Some orders could be subject to a consultation fee or handling charge.
Offline means the data type is not available through our web site. Contact the NCDC for availability, pricing and ordering information. Many items cost more when ordered offline.
Some products require Adobe Acrobat Reader.
NASA Technical Reports Server
NTRS indexes citations, full-text documents, and multimedia content from NACA and NASA publications and research reports. Content includes conference papers, journal articles, meeting papers, patents, research reports, theses and dissertations, images, movies, and technical videos. Full text available as PDFs. 1903-present.
The NTRS integrates NASA's following three collections and enables search and retrieval through a common interface:

NACA Collection: Citations and reports from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics period lasting from 1916 to 1958.
NASA Collection: Citations and documents created or sponsored by NASA starting in 1958 and continuing to the present.
NIX Collection: Citations and images, photos, movies, and videos are downloaded from the NASA Image eXchange and served out through NTRS. NIX is a separate system and users can also go directly to the NIX site to search imagery.

Citations in the NTRS indicate if an item is available online or if it should be ordered. If the item is available from NASA, the citation will provide guidance on ordering items from the NASA Center for AeroSpace Information. If the item is not available from NASA, the citation provides a link to a list of suggested sources from which to order the document.
TranStats from the U.S. Department of Transportation
TranStats indexes statistical data on all forms of transportation from agencies in USDOT. Much of the data can be downloaded in spreadsheet or statistical software formats. 1990-present.
TRID
TRID indexes citations, abstracts, and some full text of journal articles, books, conference proceedings, technical reports, environmental impact statements, and theses on transportation research. It integrates the former TRIS and ITRD databases.
Records in TRID are indexed with a standardized vocabulary from the Transportation Research Thesaurus (TRT) or the ITRD Thesaurus, depending on the source organization.

The TRID Database contains more than 900,000 records of references to books, technical reports, conference proceedings, and journal articles in the field of transportation research. Almost 500 serial titles are regularly scanned and indexed for TRID. TRID's focus is transportation research. TRID does not contain information on vehicle standards and specifications, patent information, market research, or military transport.

In addition to the material that is indexed and abstracted at the Transportation Research Board and from ITRD, TRID receives records from several sources:
TLIB

TLIB Records are bibliographic records received from major transportation libraries. These citations generally do not have abstracts but they cover journals and publications that would not otherwise be covered in TRID. The Harmer E. Davis Library at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley provides monthly updates of journal articles and technical reports. The Northwestern University Transportation Library provides monthly contributions of selections from its TRANWeb database (a database of journal articles and papers on transportation and law enforcement).
EIS

Almost 20,000 Environmental Impact Statements from the EIS Database produced by the Northwestern University Transportation Library have been added to the TRIS Database to date. TRID now contains records for the largest collection of Environmental Impact Statements in the world.
Theses

Since 2007, the Northwestern University Transportation Library has contributed transportation-related theses to the TRID database. To date approximate 3,000 records have been contributed. The Northwestern University Transportation Library adds new thesis records to TRID annually.
Wolfram MathWorld
Wolfram MathWorld provides full-text reference articles (with bibliographic citations), a glossary of mathematical terms, downloadable Mathematica notebooks, and a guide to Mathematica.
MathWorld has been assembled over more than a decade by Eric W. Weisstein with assistance from thousands of contributors. Since its contents first appeared online in 1995, MathWorld has emerged as a nexus of mathematical information in both the mathematics and educational communities. It not only reaches millions of readers from all continents of the globe, but also serves as a clearinghouse for new mathematical discoveries that are routinely contributed by researchers. Its entries are extensively referenced in journals and books spanning all educational levels, including those read by researchers, elementary school students and teachers, engineers, and hobbyists.

MathWorld continues to grow and evolve with the assistance of thousands of contributors. Careful oversight of all aspects of its content and interface by creator Eric Weisstein, and more recently with able assistance from MathWorld associate Ed Pegg, Jr., provides an exacting level of quality, accuracy, and consistency. As a result, MathWorld is considered not only the clearest and most readable online resource for mathematics, but also one of the most reliable.

MathWorld is actively developed and maintained. The site is updated daily, thus achieving extremely rapid communication of new and extended results--many of which are provided by outside contributors--while at the same time maintaining a degree of editorial oversight and consistency across (and among) the site's nearly 13,000 entries that is simply not possible for other sites.

MathWorld currently features a number of innovative interactive elements that enhance its usability for a variety of different readers. These features include:

The MathWorld Classroom, which provides a set of pop-up "capsule summaries" for more than 300 mathematical terms.
Extensive citations to books and journal articles, many of which are active hyperlinks (but no Get VText links or cues).
Thousands of downloadable Mathematica notebooks.
Several types of interactive entries, including LiveGraphics3D applets for interactive three-dimensional geometry.
A powerful full-text search engine with both basic and advanced searching capabilities.
Dublin Core and Mathematics Subject Classification metadata in the HTML headers of each page.
Special information for Mathematica users.

The technology behind MathWorld is heavily based on Mathematica. In addition to being indispensable in the derivation, validation, and visualization of MathWorld's content, Mathematica is used to build the website itself, taking advantage of its advanced mathematical typesetting and data-processing capabilities.