Article Databases

I could spend days searching for info in journal/magazine/article databases. Love it. Hopefully this page will run the gamut from ridiculous to sublime, and provide some links to databases that are free, offer free citations, or are lower cost than the "heavy hitters.

If you’re looking for Africana, this is the place to find it. Indexes the Afircan Women’s Bibliographic Database and the Bibliography of Africana Periodical Literature Database, and offers a few other Africa-related resources as well.

The Alcohol Studies Database
 A scholarly, newly-updated citation database out of Rutgers dealing with beverage alcohol. A great resource if this is your area of interest.

 Beacon for Freedom of Expression is a Norwegian-produced, international, database of books, articles, and newspaper reports on censorship. Lots of good, and perhaps hard-to-find information. Site links to other wesites with info on censorship, human rights, and even librarianship.

Um, yep, the name says it all. Another highly specialized and FREE resource for your enjoyment!

Country Studies 
A nice, FREE online database of information on a “region’s historical setting, geography, society, economy, political system, and foreign policy.” This is a great database especially of you don't have access to CultureGrams. The info is from 1986, so it may be dated in some cases, but still worth a look.

Who knew? EBSCO is offering free access to their Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstarcts database. I love EBSCO, and if it’s free, it’s for me.

A lot of annoying advertising has been added to this site since I last visited (quite a while ago). If you can get past that, this OK database accesses free and pay articles in a number of magazines and website. One nice thing is that it gives you the option to search for free articles only, and links to the websites ofthe sources indexed.

HighBeam Research
HighBeam Research is an article database that I haven't heard much about, but that's been the case with a couple of databases that have turned out to be decent places to look for obscure stuff. It seems that the database is magazine heavy and features international content as well as US sources. HighBeam isn't a free database, but has marketed itself as a research tool that falls between the free sources and the "high-end" subscriptions - and is priced at $99.95 a year (or 29.95 a month). You can sign-up for a free 7-day trial, but be aware that it is one of those that will start charging you if you fail to cancel before the trial is over (I hate that!).

I discovered Ingenta while in grad school, and actually found articles that I missed (or didn’t exist) in other databases. Free to search, free citations (and sometimes abstracts). Pay for full-text. Great source for international resources and info.

This online community and database access site offers free access to case law, legal forms, and legal headline news, as well as mucho links to online legal resources. Sure, you can find much of this info online yourself, but it's handy to have it all in one place. Best of all, for those libraries and professionals that can't afford traditional subscription prices, lexisONE offers a number of "research value packages" that can make your research more affordable.

MagPortal 
This site indexes a variety of “magazines” - some you’ve heard of, some are a bit obscure, some are available only online, some are free. Offers abstracts and in some caces full-text via a direct link to the article. Not bad.

A groovy databaseof historical newspaper “pages” dating back to 1759. This, apparently, is a HUGE collection, with 39 million pages indexed. This is a subscription service, but it may be affordable for some smaller libraries who have a use for it.

This has to be one of the best FREE article databases around. PubMed includes the MedLine database, as well as the “Old MedLine” (pre-1996). Governed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), this is a truly scholarly and professional database, and even offers access to the MeSH database, NLM’s controlled vocabulary. While you are there, be sure to check out OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man).

Tiny database dedicated to all that is meat and food-safety related. Indexes the Journal of Food Protection, and the Journal of Food Sciences. Odd. Potentially useful. FREE!