# What's the physics equivalent of PubMed

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-physics-equivalent-of-pubmed/638383>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 21, 2012, 4:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-physics-equivalent-of-pubmed/638383 "2012-10-21T04:20:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![dasmoocher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)\
**Post date:** [October 21, 2012, 4:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-physics-equivalent-of-pubmed/638383/1 "2012-10-21T04:20:48Z")

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Sorry, search of Goggle and the boards didn’t seem to give a clear answer.

If I have a biomedical question, I can query PubMed about “IGFBP1” and get lots of links to papers regarding this keyword, but what similar database can I query about a physics question like “M theory”?

I do realize PubMed is a public resource maintained by NIH, but does the physics community have something similar?

Thanks in advance and sorry if I missed something obvious.

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**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\
**Post date:** [October 21, 2012, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-physics-equivalent-of-pubmed/638383/2 "2012-10-21T04:50:38Z")

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[The Arxiv](http://www.arxiv.org) is probably the closest equivalent, being a depository for pretty much all papers written since the invention of the Internet. It’s technically preprints, but in most cases, the paper is identical to what was or will be eventually published. It’s not as easy to search as you might like, though, and a topic as broad as M theory will get you an unusably large number of results.

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**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\
**Post date:** [October 21, 2012, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-physics-equivalent-of-pubmed/638383/3 "2012-10-21T05:32:41Z")

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[ADS](http://adswww.harvard.edu/) started out as a catalog of astronomy/astrophysics papers, but it has a fair number of physics journals as well.

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**Author:** ![Ashley\_Pomeroy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c68b51/32.png) [@Ashley\_Pomeroy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ashley_Pomeroy)\
**Post date:** [October 21, 2012, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-physics-equivalent-of-pubmed/638383/4 "2012-10-21T18:39:55Z")

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If you’re fascinated with with the study of strange people, Arxiv has a bizarro world twin, [Vixra](http://vixra.org), which apparently has less or no editorial insight. I didn’t realise that so many people were experts on quantum theory, and that it was so easy to grasp!

E.g.:

> **[New Dark Matter Black Holes and a New Dark Energy Higgs Field, Lead to a...](https://vixra.org/abs/1209.0092)**

In which I learn that “_the raspberry shaped entangled CP symmetric Multiverse seems to be the logic result of the quest for symmetry and inter-multiversal entanglement between anti-copy universes could be the base for the collapse of all wavefunctions (Schrödinger’s cat) including consciousness_”, which makes me wonder if anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like.