By the time you begin writing your thesis, you’ll typically face the challenge of conducting an extensive literature search. But even in general, it often takes ten years or more for new findings to make their way into textbooks; consequently, for many more current topics, you’ll also need to rely on scientific articles (papers), which are usually published in academic journals.

An overview of all major physics journals can be found at TU Graz - Physics Journals or Uni Graz - Physics Journals. This also shows which journals are freely available, subscribed to by the university, or inaccessible to us. For the latter, you can usually view the abstract, i.e., the short summary of the article, but not the full text. Most publishers and journals offer search functions; see, for example, Science Direct, IoP or PROLA.

ArXiV is the world’s leading preprint server. This means that even before an article appears in a (usually subscription-based) journal, a preprint version can often be downloaded here for free. A search function—though not very sophisticated, yet quite helpful—is available under find. The articles are typically available in PDF and PostScript formats, as well as in LaTeX source code. Clicking on SLAC-SPIRES HEP in the abstract section takes you to additional information, including a corresponding BIBTeX entry and the number of citations (often helpful for assessing the relevance or at least the acceptance of an article). For more on the status and significance of online archives, see also Serials Crisis.

Of course, there are also various other ways to find specific articles. Google now offers its own portal for searching academic literature: Google Scholar In addition, many researchers make articles available for download on their own websites—articles that are often difficult to obtain otherwise. Another channel of communication, in addition to journals, are Conference Proceedings, which are published in book form following many conferences and typically focus on a relatively narrow research topic.

Some research fields also have their own platforms where students can search for relevant publications. For astrophysics and space sciences, for example, there is the ADS. Your thesis advisor can provide further helpful guidance on where to find relevant literature.