The Oxford English Dictionary is a guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words and phrases, both present and past, from across the English-speaking world. It traces the usage of words through 3.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts, song lyrics and social media posts.

Oxford Reference Online is a collection of more than 200 dictionaries and encyclopedia from various subject areas. Oxford Reference Online consists of a wealth of facts, figures, definitions, and translations found in dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press. In addition to the Premium Collection, the Western Civilization Collection is available.

Various dictionaries are available.

The Portico digital preservation service was created in 2002 with the support of libraries and publishers to ensure that the world's scholarship, now stored and disseminated largely in digital form, will be accessible to future generations. Users from the Max Planck Society gain access to preserved content when specific conditions or “trigger events” cause titles to no longer be available from the publisher or through a successor.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is one of the world's most-cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals. Established in 1914, PNAS publishes the results of original research, as well as science news, commentaries, reviews, perspectives, colloquium papers, and actions of the National Academy of Sciences. The MPG subscription also covers article-processing charges for Max Planck authors in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)". Further details are available on the MPDL website.

SAGE Journals Online provides access to more than 1000 journals with a coverage spanning the humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine. Max Planck researchers have full text access to a multidisciplinary selection of the full journal collection. In addition, the agreement covers article-processing charges for Max Planck authors in Gold Open Access journals and in hybrid titles in the SAGE Premier package. Further details are available on the MPDL website.

The Science Online platform provides fulltext access to the peer-reviewed journals published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory is a bibliographic database providing detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative information on serials published throughout the world. It covers all subjects, and includes publications that are published regularly or irregularly and are circulated free of charge or by paid subscription. Ulrich’s was first published in 1932.

Wiley Online Library Books feature over 15,000 scholarly and professional books, handbooks, dictionaries, companions and landmark book series from Blackwell Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, and Wiley-VCH. From this collection, a set of more than 1,000 e-books was purchased for users from the Max Planck Society. This selection is continuously extended by single e-book acquisitions by MPG libraries. In addition, the MPG purchased 9 electronic Major Reference Works and the Encyclopedia of Life Sciences.

The ZDB is the world’s largest specialized database for serial titles (journals, annuals, newspapers etc., incl. e-journals). The ZDB contains more than 1 million bibliographic records of serials from the 16th century onwards, from all countries, in all languages, held in 4000 German (and some foreign) libraries, with holdings information. It does not index individual journal articles.