When looking for academic journal articles you can use the 'everything' search in Library Search or search directly in the databases below, which we’ve selected as being most relevant to your subject area.
Databases are the best place to find academic journal articles as they offer advanced search tools, metric data, and export options for referencing. These databases also often provide access to information types such as conference papers, book chapters, review articles, trade magazines, and more. BrowZine can also be used to explore e-journal titles in your subject.
While most of our collection is now available digitally, some titles may only be accessible in print. You can find these journal titles using an ‘everything except articles’ search in Library Search.
You’ll also find links to essential reading for your programme in your module reading lists on Canvas.
Key Databases and E-journal Collections
Databases will either provide you with the full text of the journal or they will give you the bibliographic details of an article. Where full text is not available, look for the
link and follow this to see if we have the full text available via Library Search.
Subject databases
Subject databases are tailored to particular subject areas. They tend to use precise terminology relating to the subject area, making searches more accurate, and can include subject specific tools and features.
- PhilPapersPhilPapers is a comprehensive index (2.4 million entries) and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers, including journals, books and archives. The linked database PhilArchive provides access to open access publications.
Multidisciplinary databases
Much like Library Search, multidisciplinary databases cover a wide range of topics and are a great place to scope your search, or to use if your topic covers more than one subject area.
- Arts and Humanities Citation Index This link opens in a new window
Part of the multidisciplinary Web of Science Core Collection database, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index provides coverage from 1975 to present, of articles from leading journals in a broad range of arts and humanities disciplines. Includes useful tools such as cited reference searching, so you can navigate forward and backward through the literature to uncover all the information relevant to your research and set up citation alerts; and author searching so you can quickly find experts in your field.
- ProQuest Social Sciences Premium Collection This link opens in a new windowThis collection provides access to databases covering the international literature in the social sciences, including politics, sociology, social services, anthropology, criminology and education. Together, they provide abstracts, indexing and full text coverage of journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, working papers and more. You can search across the whole collection or choose a specific database to retrieve information. Use the thesauri within the databases to identify alternative keywords.
- Scopus This link opens in a new windowScopus is a large, multidisciplinary database, which indexes peer reviewed journal articles, books, book chapters, conference proceedings and trade publications. It provides cited reference searching, so you can navigate forward and backward through the literature to uncover all the information relevant to your research and set up citation alerts. Other useful tools include citation overviews, author and affiliation searching, visual analysis of search results and a journal analyser and author identifier tools (if you are interested in publishing work).
- Web of Science This link opens in a new windowWeb of Science is a multidisciplinary database, which indexes scholarly journal articles, books, book chapters and conference proceedings. It provides cited reference searching, so you can navigate forward and backward through the literature to uncover all the information relevant to your research. Use citation reports to see citation activity and geographical trends and the ‘analyse results’ tool to identify trends and publication patterns.
Support and services
Explore further tools, guides and support from the Library.
