21 LEGIT RESEARCH DATABASES
Written by Scribendi
Has this ever happened to you? While looking for websites for research, you come across a research paper site that claims to connect academics to a peer-reviewed article database for free.
Intrigued, you search for keywords related to your topic, only to discover that you must pay a hefty subscription fee to access the service. After the umpteenth time being duped, you begin to wonder if there's even such a thing as free journal articles.
Subscription fees and paywalls are often the bane of students and academics, especially those at small institutions who don't provide access to many free article directories and repositories.
Whether you're working on an undergraduate paper, a PhD dissertation, or a medical research study, we want to help you find tools to locate and access the information you need to produce well-researched, compelling, and innovative work.
Below, we discuss why peer-reviewed articles are superior and list out the best free article databases to use in 2022.
Download Our Free Research Database Roundup PDF
Why Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Journal Articles Are More Authoritative
Determining what sources are reliable can be challenging. Peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles are the gold standard in academic research. Reputable academic journals have a rigorous peer-review process.
The peer review process provides accountability to the academic community, as well as to the content of the article. The peer review process involves qualified experts in a specific (often very specific) field performing a review of an article's methods and findings to determine things like quality and credibility.
Peer-reviewed articles can be found in peer-reviewed article databases and research databases, and if you know that a database of journals is reliable, that can offer reassurances about the reliability of a free article. Peer review is often double blind, meaning that the author removes all identifying information and, likewise, does not know the identity of the reviewers. This helps reviewers maintain objectivity and impartiality so as to judge an article based on its merit.
Where to Find Peer-Reviewed Articles
Peer-reviewed articles can be found in a variety of research databases. Below is a list of some of the major databases you can use to find peer-reviewed articles and other sources in disciplines spanning the humanities, sciences, and social sciences.
What Are Open Access Journals?
An open access (OA) journal is a journal whose content can be accessed without payment. This provides scholars, students, and researchers with free journal articles. OA journals use alternate methods of funding to cover publication costs so that articles can be published without having to pass those publication costs on to the reader.
Some of these funding models include standard funding methods like advertising, public funding, and author payment models, where the author pays a fee in order to publish in the journal. There are OA journals that have non-peer-reviewed academic content, as well as journals that focus on dissertations, theses, and papers from conferences, but the main focus of OA is peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles.
The internet has certainly made it easier to access research articles and other scholarly publications without needing access to a university library, and OA takes another step in that direction by removing financial barriers to academic content.
Choosing Wisely
Features of Legitimate OA Journals
There are things to look out for when trying to decide if a free publication journal is legitimate:
Mission statement—The mission statement for an OA journal should be available on their website.
Publication history—Is the journal well established? How long has it been available?
Editorial board—Who are the members of the editorial board, and what are their credentials?
Indexing—Can the journal be found in a reliable database?
Peer review—What is the peer review process? Does the journal allow enough time in the process for a reliable assessment of quality?
Impact factor—What is the average number of times the journal is cited over a two-year period?
Features of Illegitimate OA Journals
There are predatory publications that take advantage of the OA format, and they are something to be wary of. Here are some things to look out for:
Contact information—Is contact information provided? Can it be verified?
Turnaround—If the journal makes dubious claims about the amount of time from submission to publication, it is likely unreliable.
Editorial board—Much like determining legitimacy, looking at the editorial board and their credentials can help determine illegitimacy.
Indexing—Can the journal be found in any scholarly databases?
Peer review—Is there a statement about the peer review process? Does it fit what you know about peer review?
How to Find Scholarly Articles
Identify Keywords
Keywords are included in an article by the author. Keywords are an excellent way to find content relevant to your research topic or area of interest. In academic searches, much like you would on a search engine, you can use keywords to navigate through what is available to find exactly what you're looking for.
Authors provide keywords that will help you easily find their article when researching a related topic, often including general terms to accommodate broader searches, as well as some more specific terms for those with a narrower scope. Keywords can be used individually or in combination to refine your scholarly article search.
Narrow Down Results
Sometimes, search results can be overwhelming, and searching for free articles on a journal database is no exception, but there are multiple ways to narrow down your results. A good place to start is discipline.
What category does your topic fall into (psychology, architecture, machine learning, etc.)? You can also narrow down your search with a year range if you're looking for articles that are more recent.
A Boolean search can be incredibly helpful. This entails including terms like AND between two keywords in your search if you need both keywords to be in your results (or, if you are looking to exclude certain keywords, to exclude these words from the results).
Consider Different Avenues
If you're not having luck using keywords in your search for free articles, you may still be able to find what you're looking for by changing your tactics. Casting a wider net sometimes yields positive results, so it may be helpful to try searching by subject if keywords aren't getting you anywhere.
You can search for a specific publisher to see if they have OA publications in the academic journal database. And, if you know more precisely what you're looking for, you can search for the title of the article or the author's name.
The Top 21 Free Online Journal and Research Databases
Navigating OA journals, research article databases, and academic websites trying to find high-quality sources for your research can really make your head spin. What constitutes a reliable database? What is a useful resource for your discipline and research topic? How can you find and access full-text, peer-reviewed articles?
Fortunately, we're here to help. Having covered some of the ins and outs of peer review, OA journals, and how to search for articles, we have compiled a list of the top 21 free online journals and the best research databases. This list of databases is a great resource to help you navigate the wide world of academic research.
These databases provide a variety of free sources, from abstracts and citations to full-text, peer-reviewed OA journals. With databases covering specific areas of research and interdisciplinary databases that provide a variety of material, these are some of our favorite free databases, and they're totally legit!
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https://www.scribendi.com/academy/articles/free_online_journal_and_research_databases.en.html
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