Literature search
The online catalogue (OPAC) provides information on the entire media inventory of the university library:
Journal articles are not included. These can be researched through selected special databases. You can find further information on this topic in the “Literature Search” section under "Database search".
Choose "Account" from the OPAC menu to renew checked-out media, reserve books checked out to other users, or order media from the repository. You can also enquire about your fine status and change your password.
Personal data cannot be independently altered. In order to do this, please contact a library employee, either in person or by sending an e-mail.
For further information, please see the "Help" function of the OPAC.
All users of the library can access the electronic resources (e-books, e-journals and databases) on the campus of the university. For members of the university, the content is also available outside of the university network. Please open the search pages via "Fernzugriff (remote access)" and then chose the required e-resource.
Disclaimer: The library offers licensed content to its users solely for the purposes of their personal academic use. Users are not permitted to pass on contents either wholly or in part in digital form (e.g. electronic data storage media), by remote data transfer or in analogue form (e.g. paper copies). Copying licensed content or parts of licensed content for the purposes of distribution (including via the Internet) or distributing it (whether commercially or free of charge) is not permitted. Any translation, editing or other revision of licensed content or parts of licensed content is prohibited. The use of robot systems, spiders and crawlers and other automatic downloading programmes for the purposes of systematic and automatic searching, indexing or accessing licensed content is not allowed.
The ASH library has acquired the access rights for over 50.000 e-books. The terms and conditions of use are prescribed by the individual publishing companies and providers. University members can also use the e-books outside of the university network. To access the e-books, always log in to "Remote access" first and then search in the OPAC or on the various e-book platforms.
The following publishers give you access to their entire range of e-books. ATTENTION: many titles are not listed in OPAC at the same time. Please use the following links to access your search:
Publishing houses: Barbara Budrich Verlag, Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, facultas, transcript Verlag et al.
Note: E-books can be downloaded or printed out by the chapter as PDFs without restrictions.
You also have access to licensed e-books on the following e-book platforms (but not to the entire range).
ASH Library e-book platforms listed alphabetically by publisher / provider:
Publishers: C.H. Beck, Medizinisch Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft and others.
Note: E-books can be downloaded or printed out by the chapter as PDFs without restrictions.
Platform with content from various publishers from different fields of knowledge.
Publishers: Beltz/Juventa, Campus, Herder, Klett-Cotta, Lambertus, Psychiatrie-Verlag, Schattauer and others.
Note: E-books can be downloaded or printed out by the chapter as PDFs without restrictions.
De Gruyter
Publishers: Academic Studies Press, Harvard University Press and others. An overview of all participating publishers can be found here.
Note: E-books can be downloaded or printed out by the chapter as PDFs without restrictions.
Ebook Central
Ebook Central provides access to scientific ebooks from various publishers. All available titles can be read online. In order to edit content or download it as a PDF, you must create your own user account. Please note that a maximum of 40% of an ebook per user can be downloaded within 24 hours.
A guide for using Ebook Central can be found here
Videos about Ebook Central can be found here
Note: E-books can be downloaded or printed as PDFs without restrictions.
Publishers: Nomos, Psychosozial-Verlag, Tectum and others.
Note: E-books can be downloaded or printed out by the chapter as PDFs without restrictions.
Note: E-books can be downloaded or printed as PDFs without restrictions.
Springer Verlag (SpringerLink)
Publishers: Springer and others. An overview of all participating publishers can be found here.
Note: Items available in German and English language. E-books can be downloaded as PDFs without restrictions.
Publishers: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht and others. An overview of all participating publishers can be found here.
Note: E-books can be downloaded or printed out by the chapter as PDFs without restrictions.
The university library offers reading rights to over 2,500 online journals from various fields. Some of the online journals were acquired through the "National Literature Supply and National Licenses" program, which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and managed nationwide by certain institutions.
ASH members can also use this service outside the university network via remote access.
In addition, 85 journal titles (print) are available to you through ongoing subscriptions. You can find the current issues and older, already bound issues from 2016 onwards in the reading room.
Journal volumes up to 2015 are located in the storage area (basement) and must be ordered through the OPAC. They are made available on the hour, every hour.
For searching individual journal articles, selected databases are available to you. If no full text is available in the databases, you can access the articles through a journal search in the OPAC, the Elektronischen Zeitschriftenbibliothek (EZB), or the Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB) (provided these are journals that the library has in its collection or has licensed).
In the OPAC you find all journals (print and electronic) available in the ASH library. For e-journals the OPAC refers to the EZB.
The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek (EZB) lists more than 85,000 online journals with access to full texts from all subject areas. Of these, approximately 53,000 are freely accessible. The search can be conducted alphabetically by journal titles or by subject areas.
The full text of the journal is freely accessible.
The journal is accessible in full text for the users of the university library.
Only a portion of the volumes published in the journal is licensed for full text access.
The journal is not subscribed to and therefore not available in full text. However, tables of contents and often abstracts are usually available for free.
The Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB, periodical database) indexes more than 1.7 million journals, newspapers and other periodicals available in print or electronic in Germany and Austria. Full texts of e-journals licensed by the ASH library are directly available.
SUBITO is a delivery service for periodical articles (a charge will be incurred).
IMPORTANT! You will need to register personally. It is not possible to order via the library.
Unlike the library catalogue (index of inventory), databases index literature or specialised information in a particular field of knowledge. They mainly refer to articles from journals, studies, essays from editorial works, conference reports, etc.
A second step is often necessary to search for the location of available required literature. A variety of databases index full texts (such as e-books and e-journals) as well as literature.
For members of the university, the content is also available outside of the university network. Please open the search pages via remote access and then chose the required e-resource.
This site will show you the databases you can access through the library:
CareLit is a database compiled by LISK for the healthcare field that focuses on hospital management, nursing home management and nursing. CareLit currently indexes around 147,000 data records.
IMPORTANT! It is possible to download full texts in the library.
CINAHL® with Full Text is a comprehensive collection of full texts from journals on nursing and related topics. The full texts come from 610 journals which are indexed in CINAHL®.
ClinicalKey Student Pflege is a learning platform for students and teachers of the nursing bachelor programme. In addition to providing evidence of reference books and images, it offers various teaching materials and learning tools. In order to access the content and functions of the learning platform, a personal user account must first be created on the start page under "Register now".
Cochrane Library is the highest quality database on evidence-based medicine in the world. It contains 650,000 entries and reviews from journals, conference reports and other sources on the latest proven medical treatments and controlled clinical studies.
The Digital German Women's Archive (DDF) is an interactive portal on the history of women's movements in Germany. It invites you to get to know the themes, actors and networks of women's movements from two centuries.
The holdings of Alice Salomon Archive can also be found here in digital form.
DZI SoLitis the literature database of the German Central Institute for Social Issues. The database academically documents and covers the content of scientific papers, monographs, collected editions and grey literature in the topic areas of social work, social education, welfare work, support for the elderly, nursing and special education published since 1979. It currently encompasses around 200,000 datasets, with an average of 6,000 new datasets added every year.
Search tip: The DZI provides an alphabetic thesaurus for systematic literature research with keywords in DZI SoLit.
EBCSOhost Web provides access to the combined content of the databases CINAHL with full text, Medline, PsycInfo, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, SocINDEX, Education Research Complete, Social Work Abstracts and Psyndex.
Education Research Complete is the authoritative online source for education research. Topics include all stages of development from early childhood to higher education and all special areas of education such as multilingual education, health education and testing. Education Research Complete contains indexing and abstracts for over 2,100 journals and full texts from over 1,200 journals and around 500 books and monographs.
In the Enzyklopädie Erziehungswissenschaft Online, all the knowledge that can be assigned to educational science is prepared in the form of handbook articles. The quality and systematics of the preparation are based on the available state of knowledge.
ERIC (Institute of Education Sciene) has around 1.7 million references. This Database is the world's most extensive bibliographic database of educational science. Since 1966, mostly English-language literature (books, magazine articles, research reports, conference reports, etc.) on all areas of education science has been documented.
Fachportal Pädagogik (a special portal for pedagogy) is the central entry platform for education-related specialist information and full-text access. It offers access to electronic and printed monographs, periodical articles and online materials on educational theory, both free and subject to charge.
juris Rechtsportal Members of ASH Berlin can access the social module which is offered in cooperation with the Erich Schmidt publishing company (previously Fachportal Sozialrecht). It contains laws, court rulings, comments, journals and manuals on all social law topics.
Kita-Fachtexte offers studies with high practical relevance on various topics of early education. Articles discuss a topic both theoretically and on the basis of empirical studies. The focus is on discipline related discourses, concepts and methods. The Fachtexte are downloadable for free on aliceOpen.
MEDLINE offers substantiated medical information on the topics of general medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the healthcare system, preclinical sciences and much more.
PEDro is a physiotherapy evidence database offered by the Centre for Evidence-Based Physiotherapy (CEBP). PEDro is a freely accessible database with over 33,000 randomised controlled studies, systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines for physiotherapy.
Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection is a comprehensive database with information on topics relating to behavioural research, psychiatry and psychology, thought processes, anthropology, observational methods and experiment methods. It is the world’s largest full text psychology database and offers around 400 journals in full text.
PsycINFO The PsycINFO® database is a respected resource of the American Psychological Association (APA) for abstracts of scientific papers, book chapters, books and dissertations. It is the most comprehensive resource for scientifically reviewed literature in the areas of behavioural sciences and mental health.
PSYNDEX is a database for psychology and related fields operated by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID). It contains records from over 250,000 documents from the German-speaking area (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). As PSYNDEX does not itself contain any full texts, it is categorised as a reference database.
Pubmed - please refer MEDLINE offers substantiated medical information on the topics of general medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the healthcare system, preclinical sciences and much more. PubMed is the free web interface for searching in MEDLINE
SocINDEX with Full Textis the world’s most comprehensive and high-quality sociology database. It comprises over 2.1 million datasets with topic headings from a sociology thesaurus with over 20,000 terms created by experts and lexicographers. SocINDEX contains full text from 860 journals dating back to 1908, full texts of over 830 books and monographs and 16,800 conference documents.
Statista is a German online portal for statistics, and provides access to the data of market and polling institutes such as the Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach (IfD), the Gesellschaft Sozialwissenschaftlicher Infrastruktureinrichtungen (GESIS) and the Deutsche Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW).
The Alice Salomon Archive in Berlin Schöneberg keeps historical documents on the development of professional social work from its beginnings in the 19th century and makes them accessible to interested users. You can find further information about the search in the archive here (german).
aliceOpen, the institutional repository (Publikationsserver) of ASH Berlin, presents various publications by university members, such as essays, documentation of research and projects, outstanding degree theses by students as well as selected documents with reference to ASH Berlin.
The Research reports of ASH Berlin provide information about the wide variety of research activities at the university. The reports provide data and facts about research projects and the publication work of researchers at ASH Berlin. In addition, insights are provided into international research and development cooperation projects.
You can use the following tools and pages to search for open access publications:
The free browser plug-in unpaywall allows you to search for open access articles. It is available for Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
SSOAR, operated by the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, is a free accessible document server for researching scientific articles in the social sciences.
peDOCS is a repository operated by the Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsforschung und Bildungsinformation (DIPF) for literature in the field of education and educational science.
Open Knowledge Maps is a tool for searching for free available scientific content, but also for mapping a wide range of research topics. In addition to the search for free scientific publications, so-called knowledge maps are created for various research topics. These knowledge maps provide an overview of a research topic with the associated documents and concepts.
More about Open Knowledge Maps: https://openknowledgemaps.org/about
