UC Library Search, accessible from the search box on the library's homepage, helps you locate books, film, music, maps, and various other materials at the UC San Diego Library and beyond. It also contains a limited number of online journal and newspaper articles. You may search by keyword, title, and author, and filter your search to what is available online. You can also place an interlibrary loan request through UC Library Search for materials at other UC campuses or libraries worldwide using your Single Sign-On credentials.
UC Library Search does not include all the content to which the Library subscribes. To extend your search, try a database. The database you use depends on the topic or subject you have chosen and the type of information you need to access. You may choose among broad subject areas (e.g., biology, art, political science, etc.), as well as interdisciplinary databases or ones that search across multiple disciplines.
You must also be on the campus network or logged into the VPN to access the information for any database with a blue Triton icon.
BIOSIS covers around 6,000 journals, conference proceedings, books, & technical reports in all aspects of biological sciences. Includes ability to search forr cited references.
PubMed (link specific to UC)
Covers over 5,700 journals in the biomedical and health sciences and years covered late 1940's - present, with additional older medical literature selectively added. Search using keywords or the controlled vocabulary called MeSH. PubMed will automatically match your keyword terms to MeSH terms. For additional tips, see the Library's PubMed page.
Covers over 18,000 journals in all subjects (coverage back to 1900 for science and social science journals), as well as 80,000 books and more than 180K conference proceedings. Includes the popular "cited reference search" to identify papers which have cited a previously published work or author. Can also sort by "times cited" and find related articles based on commonly cited works.
Scholarly publications in all disciplines: articles, theses/dissertations, books, and more, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities etc.
Looking for a different topic? This page lists all of our databases. You can pre-filter by a broad subject area.
For access to library resources from off campus, you need to configure your computer or mobile device to use the campus VPN. You need to use the "allthruucsd" option for connecting to library content - this is not needed for general campus work.
A diagram of what your VPN client should look like is on the VPN Settings tab above.
