The collection of Computer Science is almost entirely digital, both in journals and books. The library for mathematics and computer science can be found on the ground floor of the Gorlaeus and offers 120 study spaces and 7 collaboration spaces.

Computer scientists mostly publish conference proceedings and journal articles, hence the collection of information consists mainly of e-journals. Major publishers in this field are the Computer Society, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Due to the rapid developments in the field physical books are only purchased if needed. However, the library collects some e-books and e-book series, including the Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

As Web of Science does not record conference proceedings, you will only find a small part of available scientific literature for computer science in this database. Especially interdisciplinary topics and applied computer science are well reflected here.

More suitable databases for computer science are CiteSeerX and DBLP. Google Scholar is interesting as well, because of the broad scope and access to green Open Access articles. Besides these databases, the two major publishers have their own search indexes: ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore.

For articles focused on mathematical problems (such as algorithms), both MathSciNet and Zentralblatt Math provide a good starting point.

Searching for Open Access articles

Within computer science it is common to publish (a version of) an article Open Access on Arxiv.org before its official publication and peer review. Setting an alert on new publications within Arxiv is therefore a good way to keep abreast of the latest developments.

Please note: items in arXiv are not peer-reviewed. If you plan to use an article as a reference, first find out if the article was published in a scientific journal beforehand (see the heading Journal reference). Also make sure you're using the latest version!

Google Scholar is a great search engine for finding an open Access version of published articles that are not available through subscriptions and are not open at the publisher.

Reference managers can be great helps for writing your thesis efficiently. They help you keep track of why you have read something and provide an easy way to create references, which is commonly seen as cumbersome as they need specific information in a correct style. For more information, please visit the module on reference management at the Science Skills Platform.

Publications and theses are commonly written in LaTeX within technical subjects. Not all reference managers offer support for LaTeX. Mendeley can help by creating automatically updating BibTeX files of your references. Zotero (recommended for non-LaTeX-users) has similar functionality after installing the Better BibTeX Plugin.