Research databases for PhD scholars in India

Which research databases can PhD scholars in India use, and which are free?

Each database has its own job. An index tells you a paper exists and who has cited it. A few of them like PMC or CORE hold the full paper itself, and some only take you to a full text you would otherwise pay for. We took the figures in this table from each database’s own site in September 2026.

Cite this data: PhD Desk, “Research databases for PhD scholars in India”, last reviewed 1 November 2026, https://phddesk.in/guides/research-databases-for-phd

In most theses the main searching is done in Scopus and Web of Science. Both are selective and cover all fields, and the export comes out clean. To choose between them, see our side-by-side comparison of the two. Google Scholar throws up more results. Preprints, theses and some predatory journal papers are also in that count. Use it for finding papers, and keep a proper database as the record of your search.

One point on DOAJ. It lists the open access journals that meet its criteria, and for checking a journal it is useful. A journal in DOAJ is still not indexed in Scopus or Web of Science because of that listing. The checks to do are in our predatory journal guide.

How do you get access through your university, on and off campus?

The licence for a subscription is in your university’s name. You as a person don’t hold it. There are two ways a publisher recognises that you belong to your university.

On campus, by IP range. The university shares its IP range with every publisher. When you are on the campus network, open the publisher’s site and full text opens directly.

Off campus, by signing in. INFED, the Indian Access Management Federation, is run by INFLIBNET. It uses Shibboleth to confirm you are an authorised user of a member institution. Your INFED login comes from your own library. A publisher will never give it. On the publisher’s site, pick “Access through your institution”, select INFED or your university and sign in. A few universities have their own remote-access proxy too, or a separate sign-in for Scopus and Web of Science. Your library will tell which one applies.

Meet the librarian in your first month and clear four doubts. Ask which databases and journal packages the university subscribes to. Ask how to get an off-campus login, and whether One Nation One Subscription covers your university. Then ask how inter-library loan requests are handled. Please don’t give your login to friends in other universities. Only authorised users are covered by the licence, and if someone misuses it the access of your entire university can be in trouble.

What happened to e-ShodhSindhu and N-LIST?

e-ShodhSindhu came in December 2015, when the UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium, N-LIST and the INDEST-AICTE Consortium were merged. As per its brochure, universities got access by static IP range and colleges through INFED. Now INFLIBNET’s N-LIST site says the N-LIST programme is closed from 2025-26, and it sends users to One Nation One Subscription. For both schemes INFLIBNET is the executing agency. When we checked in September 2026, the e-ShodhSindhu site was under maintenance. Ask your librarian which resources still come through e-ShodhSindhu and which through ONOS.

What is One Nation One Subscription, and does it cover you?

One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) is a Government of India scheme. Under it the centre pays for access to international journals for government institutions. The Union Cabinet gave approval on 25 November 2024. We confirmed the points in this list on official pages as of September 2026.

• Start and length. ONOS started working on 1 January 2025. Phase I has approval for the calendar years 2025, 2026 and 2027 (onos.gov.in).
• What it covers. More than 13,000 journals of 30 major international publishers. For the three years ₹6,000 crore has been kept aside (PIB, 1 January 2025). The current list of publishers is on the ONOS portal.
• Who is eligible. Students, faculty and researchers in higher education institutions managed by the central and state governments, and in central government R&D institutions. As per PIB, this comes to more than 6,300 institutions.
• Who runs it. The national subscription is run by INFLIBNET, which is the UGC’s inter-university centre at Gandhinagar.
• How you get in. On campus through the institution’s IP range, and off campus through INFED (INFLIBNET’s ONOS page).
• Publishing support. PIB announced ₹150 crore a year from the centre to support eligible authors who publish in selected open access journals. How this works is explained in our open access and APC guide.

One thing we could not confirm is what comes after phase I ends in 2027. We found no decision on that. The official ONOS pages don’t name private universities or private colleges as eligible. Scholars there depend on what their own university has subscribed and on the free databases listed above. ONOS gives journals of the publishers who are part of it. Your university may or may not subscribe to Scopus or Web of Science separately, and only the library can answer that.

Which databases should you start with in your discipline?

Begin with a small set. Take one database that covers all fields and one subject database, and you will find most of the important work. Later if you find some area is missing in your results, then add one more database for that.

Keep two things in mind. Each subject database have its own search syntax, like MeSH terms in PubMed and metadata fields in IEEE. The string you made for Scopus mostly gives poor results when pasted as it is in PubMed, so change it for every database. Also keep a record of every search with the database, date, exact string and number of results. In viva-voce the examiner may ask how you collected sources, and just “Google Scholar” is not enough.

Where do Shodhganga and Shodhgangotri fit in a literature search?

Shodhganga has the full text of Indian PhD theses that member universities have deposited. For studies in the Indian context it helps a lot. There you get questionnaires already validated on Indian respondents, regional data, and review chapters on Indian literature that Scopus does not have. Your DC will also check Shodhganga to see whether your topic is already done. When you cite a thesis, cite it as a thesis. Keep in mind that theses are examined, and they are not peer-reviewed publications.

Shodhgangotri keeps the synopses that scholars submit at registration, so you can see which research is going on right now. Search it before finalising your topic, because somebody at another university may already be working on the same question. In September 2026 when we checked, it had over 18,000 synopses from more than 150 contributing universities and institutes.

How theses get deposited, and how to search well, is in our Shodhganga guide.

How can you get a paywalled paper legally?

Paywalls will come, more so at private universities and with older papers. Go through the steps below in order. Most of the time the first two steps itself are enough.

• Check your own university first. On the publisher’s page there will be an option like “Access through your institution” or “Institutional sign in”. Click it and choose INFED or your university.
• Add Unpaywall to your browser. It is a free extension. When a legal free copy is there, for example the author’s accepted manuscript in a university repository, it shows a green tab.
• Click “All versions” in Google Scholar, and then search CORE and the repositories of the universities where the authors work.
• Request an inter-library loan from the library. If your university participates, J-Gate Plus can send the article request to INFLIBNET’s inter-library loan centres.
• Write to the corresponding author. Two lines naming the paper is enough, and usually the PDF comes within days. Most authors are happy that somebody asked.

OurResearch is the maker of Unpaywall. On its site it says the copies it finds were uploaded legally by authors to university and government servers. The same site claims its users get about half of the papers they look up for free.

A short and polite mail to corresponding author works more often than you would think. Give the paper’s full title, tell them you are a PhD scholar working on a related problem, and say thanks at the end. Sci-Hub and the sites like it share copyrighted papers without permission, so please don’t download from there. Using them is illegal. Pirate sites and their mirrors also put your computer and your university account at security risk.