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Recommended Article Databases
Journal articles--along with books--are crucial secondary sources for your research papers.
If you're off-campus, log in with your w number and password.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Get full-text access to magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals in the sciences, social sciences, business, education, and the humanities. Full-text may be available via Find-It. Useful place to begin broad searches for general topics.
- America: History & Life This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive bibliography of articles on the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Use with Historical Abstracts. Full-text may be available via Find-It.
- Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Indexes journals, books and dissertations on world history (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present. Use with America History and Life. Full-text may be available via Find-It.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowUnless your topic is quite interdisciplinary, please use the Advanced Search linked under the main search box so that you can limit to searching just history (or history + classical studies, etc.) sources. Your results list will be a lot more precise!
- Arts and Humanities Citation Index This link opens in a new window
This multidisciplinary resource indexes journal literature of the arts and humanities and covers selected items from major science and social science journals. Represented disciplines include archaeology, architecture, art, classics, dance, film, folklore, poetry, history, language, linguistics, poetry, radio, television, and theatre. Search by topic, keyword, or author. Identify articles that cited a previous work. Links to full-text occur when available. Also known as AHCI.
- Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
Search an index of journals, books and other important reference sources published worldwide in the humanities. Contains unique full-text content not available in other indexes. Additional full-text may be available via Find-It.
- Readers Guide Retrospective This link opens in a new window
A searchable index of the 1890 to 1982 annual volumes of the Readers Guide. The database provides indexing and some full-text to over three million articles from popular magazines and trade publications. Useful to those studying historic news, culture, and politics.
- HeinOnline Academic
HeinOnline Academic is a full-text research collection offering U.S. federal publications such as the U.S. Code, Federal Register, treaties and agreements, U.S. and state appellate court opinions, federal legislative histories, presidential documents; a collection of legal classics; and constitutions of the world
- Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America This link opens in a new window
The Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America indexes books, essay collections, journals and government documents covering all aspects of indigenous North American culture, history and life. Covers documents from the sixteenth century to the present. Useful to anyone exploring the contributions, struggles, and issues surrounding North Americas indigenous peoples.
- Morgan Digital Databases This link opens in a new window
Access three historic research tools. The Morgan Bibliography of Ohio Imprints describes more than 10,400 books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed in Ohio between 1796 and 1850. The Ohio Name Index includes over 156,000 names from the Morgan Bibliography. The Student Name Index, 1800-1900, contains more than 740,000 entries of students, teachers, and trustees from the catalogues of the American Antiquarian Society's School and College Collection.
- Women and Social Movements in the United States This link opens in a new window
Study the history of US women and their role in social change between 1600 and 2000. Search primary documents, reviews, archive notes, and teaching tools. Includes local, state, and federal level commission reports. The resource will be useful to anyone studying women's issues and curriculum developers.
- American Periodicals This link opens in a new window
Contains page images of historic American magazines, journals and newspapers. These resources illustrate the development of American culture, politics and society from the mid-eighteenth century through 1900.
- American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, Series 1, 1684-1820 This link opens in a new window
The AAS Historical Periodicals Collection provides digital access to the most comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1684-1820, documenting the life of Americas people.
- American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, Series 2, 1821-1837 This link opens in a new window
- American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, Series 3, 1838-1852 This link opens in a new window
- American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, Series 4, 1853-1865 This link opens in a new window
- American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, Series 5, 1866-1912 This link opens in a new window
- SHAFR Guide OnlineA near-comprehensive, 2.1 million-word online annotated bibliography of historical work covering the entire span of U.S. foreign relations. It aims to jump-start the research of both students from undergraduate to graduate school as well as the most advanced scholars.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowThis is the only free scholarly article database on the list. In order to see if you can get a copy of the article(s) you need, you have to go through the link above if you're off campus. If you don't, the journal publishers whose websites Google Scholar searches have no way of knowing you are a student whose university subscribes to the journal and they'll try to charge you for the articles.
- The National Archives CatalogThe National Archives Catalog is the online public portal to records and information from the National Archives. The catalog currently provides access to over 2 million electronic records currently in the Electronic Records Archives (ERA), which are not available elsewhere online.
Evaluating Journals
- Cabells Scholarly Analytics This link opens in a new windowFind publishing opportunities in many academic disciplines. Each entry includes submission guidelines, circulation data, review method, and contact information. The database provides both journalytics and predatory lists of journals. The humanities are poorly represented.
- Journal Citation Reports This link opens in a new window
Evaluate and compare journals using Web of Science social science and science citation data calculated as impact factors.
- Open Access Journal Quality Indicators - Grand Valley State UniversityThe open access landscape is complex. There are thousands of peer-reviewed open access journals, with new titles emerging rapidly using a variety of models. While there are many high-quality, peer-reviewed open access publications, there are also journals/publishers that engage in unprofessional or unethical practices. The following guidelines are intended to help you evaluate open access publications as you consider appropriate publication venues, or invitations to serve as reviewers or editors.
