The documents can be found as subsets of the following data bases:

BASE Bielefeld   Google Scholar   OPAC der DNB   GBV online   KOBV-Volltextserver   Sciencegate.ch   NDLTD (Find ETDs)

Furthermore, some document collections are registered in subject-specific databases:

Subject area economics   RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)

  OAIster



• OAIster is a comprehensive metadata catalogue for documents from OAI compatible repositories. It was the reference OAI search engine project of the University of Michigan from the beginning of 2001 until the end of October 2009. OAIster is part of the data collections of the data base WorldCat which is hosted by the semi-commercial library service provider OCLC. It comprises more than 25 million data sets about digital resources from more than 1.100 archives and data providers.

  BASE



• BASE is one of the biggest search engines for free scientific documents in the sense of Open Access worldwide. The search engine BASE is hosted by Bielefeld University Library. It is characterised by the following:

  • intellectual selection of the indexed resources
  • exclusive consideration of disciplinary repositories
  • a directory of resources included in the query makes searching transparent
  • indexing of internet resources from the “deep web” which are not indexed in the major commercial search engines or disappear within the large number of hits
  • presentation of search results with a differentiated display of bibliographic data
  • different options for sorting the number of hits
  • advanced search for authors, keywords, years, resources and languages

  Google Scholar



• Google Scholar searches through numerous scientific servers both commercial and Open Access. Since April 2006, the service is available also in German (besides English). The focus in the resources included is on journal contributions. Literature quoted in these is captured according to the principle of a citation index and made searchable in this way.

  Online Catalogue of Potsdam University Library


• The search function can be narrowed down to electronic publications by clicking on the symbol for search options, selecting “Online Ressourcen” from the list and saving. Click on “eingeschränkte Suchoption zurücknehmen” after searching.
• By entering the keywords “hss” and “Potsdam” into the search box, the database can be filtered for research papers from the University of Potsdam.

  OLR Online Resources of the Common Library Network


• Extract from the common library network catalogue (Gemeinsamer Verbundkatalog – GVK): The catalogue contains more than 809.000 entries for electronic documents.
• The full texts are hosted by the individual GBV libraries, other libraries or on the servers of the respective publishing houses like Springer, Kluwer, Academic Press etc.

  OPAC of the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek)


• The most comprehensive directory for online dissertations in Germany; contains almost 72.000 online dissertations from approximately 100 German universities.
• If you are looking for electronic resources only, please choose the material type (Materialart) “Online Ressourcen” in the advanced search (Erweiterte Suche).
• Furthermore, you can narrow down the search to dissertations by choosing “Hochschulschriftenvermerk” in the search mask and typing “diss” in the corresponding input box.
• Access to the electronic full texts of the online dissertations is provided in the display of search results.
• Different ways of searching the OPAC are explained on the help pages.

  Sciencegate


• The objective of Sciencegate is to make scientific Open Access literature available online without charge. Data from more than 1700 universities and Open Access journals are collected and classified for this purpose. The data base comprises more than 33 million metadata records about scientific articles at the moment. For this reason, Sciencegate is an important aggregator of scientific documents in the area of Open Access.

  OAI Search of the edoc Server of the Humboldt University of Berlin


• Document and institutional repository of the Humboldt University of Berlin
• Indexing of 473.000 electronic documents from 83 OAI archives (predominantly from Germany) at present
• The data base contains all kinds of documents and also dissertations

  OPUS


• Meta-search engine of the users of the document management system OPUS
• Indexing of electronic documents from presently 78 OPUS users (more than 50 universities among them)
• Depending on the user, the data base publishes not only dissertations and habilitations but also different kinds of university publications (reports, articles, diploma theses etc.)

Different Search Engines


• The documents can also be found in a multitude of international search engines, because the metadata and index files can be read by so-called robots which crawl the web for such information.