Scientific journals are one of the most important information source commonly used in researches. They are edited by scientific associations or individual universities. Their main advantage is that they contain the results of most recent researches. Avarage time of article publication in a journal is from 3 to 10 months, for the electronic journals it is only from1 to 3 months.

Periodicals can contain diffferent forms of documents: Articles (papers), Reports, Reviews

If you have detailed bibliographical description of an article and you know the title of the periodical, in which the article is published, you can straightly use the alphabetical periodicals catalogue of individual libraries. The most important scientific journals on physics you will find in the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Astronomy Libraries. All important foreign journals ordered by the Main Library go to the specialist libraries.

If you have to use the catalogues of the Main Library, you can use the card Periodicals Catalogue (polish and foreign titles) and, from 1994 year, the electronic catalogue of Foreign Periodicals. If you want to search for the titles accordingly to the branches of knowledge, you have to use the Systematic Catalogue of the University Main Library, where at the beginning of each branch you will find the section PERIODICALS. Remember that the systematic catalogue gives you only the partial description of the title and refers you to the complete description with the source in the relevant catalogue of periodicals.

If you are about to start your research work and you want to collect materials (literature) on given subject, you should start your searches in the general sources. Necessarily have a look into the Polish Bibliography of Journal Contents ( BZCZ), which you will find in the Information Department. It contains all Polish scientific journals starting from 1947 year till today, it has a few indexes (author’s, subject). The bibliographical descriptions from1996 to1999 you will find in the computer data base - OPAC.

The most important reviews of world literature on physics, which you should look through are available in the Institute of Physics Library:

besides the common bibliographical descriptions you will find there wide reports on literature and abstracts, which will help you to choose relevant articles.

International scientific associations prepare in Internet the lists of pages concerning different branches of knowlegde. Physics is well represented in WWW network. On the page: The Institute of Physics (IOP) you can find many titles of electronic periodicals, sometimes you can get a free access to some articles.

Editors of scientific publications promote their own prints and create electronic versions of their journals. On the editor’s pages you can find the lists of periodicals, their contents, abstracts, and sometimes full-texted articles. Obviously you have to remember that such entries are only the forms of promotion, but you can try them.

If you want to find the pages of the best international scientific periodicals use one of our choices:

If you prefer to choose on your own, go through the folowing periodicals catalogues:

Page elaborated by: Bożena Michalska