Planning your search

Repositories are online platforms where researchers can deposit their research outputs to make them freely available and accessible to other researchers and the public. Content you might find in a repository includes journal articles (preprints and published), books, book chapters, theses, conference proceedings, working papers, reports, datasets, audio-visual items and other research material. There are different types of repositories, including:

• Institutional repositories: digital repositories for sharing the research outputs of institutions, such as universities, research councils, non-government agencies, charities and more.
• Disciplinary and multi-disciplinary repositories: digital repositories that are subject-specific, multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary. 
• Preprint databases: digital repositories for preprints (draft versions of research papers that have not yet been formally peer-reviewed or published).
• Data repositories: repositories for storing and sharing research data.
• Researcher networking and sharing sites: although not formal repositories, these sites provide platforms for researchers to upload and share their research.

Why use repositories as a source of information?

• Repositories provide open access to research publications, making data and research available to everyone and breaking down barriers to learning and sharing information.
• Repositories may contain a wide-range of research material, not just books and journal articles.
• Repositories are a good way of discovering new research as they provide access to preprint journal articles, working papers, and datasets, so are useful for keeping up to date in your subject area.

Finding information in repositories

You will retrieve information from some repositories through conventional searches of library catalogues or Google Scholar, but you may want to go directly to repositories to do a more specific search for research literature. On this page are links to some key repositories, but you may find the following resources useful to identify additional repositories relevant to you:

Preprints are draft or manuscript versions, of research works, often journal articles. Preprint databases, or servers, are repositories that make preprints openly available. Preprints are usually versions of the work that have not been peer-reviewed. By making them available on preprint databases, results of new research can be communicated and shared quickly, without having to wait for the peer-review process to be completed.

When using preprints to inform your research, always ensure you critically evaluate the preprint to ensure it is reliable and valid.

While these sites include many useful resources that have been shared by their authors, there are occasional infringements of copyright and licensing agreements which we would remind you to be aware of before downloading or linking to content or uploading your own published research.

More information on open-access can be found on the UCL Open Access pages.

Further information on working with research data can be found on the UCL research data management pages.