The Scholarly Conversation: Finding Secondary Sources in Selected Journal Article Indexes, Bibliographic Databases, and Scholarly Resources
You can find scholarship about your topic in secondary resources such as scholarly and peer-reviewed journal articles, academic monographs and book chapters. Here is a short list of useful databases, including resources for researching scholarly resources in religion, history, and literature. You can locate other relevant databases by going to the Library's electronic resources database and looking up articles databases by subject area. For this class you may also be interested in looking at several different subject areas! If connecting from home, make sure your computer is configured for off-campus access.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
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A multidisciplinary database that indexes over 10,000 publications, with the complete text of over 5,500 periodicals, including a mix of peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and newspapers. - ATLA Religion Database This link opens in a new window
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Index to journal articles, book reviews, and collections of essays in all scholarly fields of religion; includes articles written in 36 languages.
- HeinOnline This link opens in a new window
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Includes 2500 legal journals, the entire Congressional Record, Federal Register, and Code of Federal Regulations, complete coverage of the U.S. Reports back to 1754, and entire databases dedicated to treaties, constitutions, case law, world trials, classic treatises, international trade, foreign relations, U.S. Presidents, and much more.
- International Medieval Bibliography This link opens in a new window
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Interdisciplinary bibliography of Europe, North Africa and the Near East for the period 300-1500. Comprehensive current bibliography of articles in journals and miscellany volumes (conference proceedings, essay collections or Festschriften) worldwide. - JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Full text back issues of core scholarly journals, browsable and searchable across multiple disciplines. Coverage starts with first issue, with moving wall for most recent 3-5 years. UCLA has access to selected JSTOR e-books only. JSTOR also includes primary source collections, including images from Artstor.
- Gale Literature Criticism This link opens in a new window
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Searchable database that provides access to the literary criticism collections Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism (CMLC), Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC), Drama Criticism (DC), Literature Criticism from 1400-1800 (LC), Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism (NCLC), Poetry Criticism (PC), Shakespeare Criticism (SC), Short Story Criticism (SSC), and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (TCLC). - MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
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Indexes worldwide publications on literature, language, linguistics, folklore, film, television, and theater from 1923 to the present. See also the MLA Directory of Periodicals. - Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
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Full text of current issues (from about 1990) of scholarly journals published by university presses, chiefly in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to Muse e-books published from 2017-present, plus a selected number of other e-book titles.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new window
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A multidisciplinary database, with searchable author abstracts, covering the journal literature of most disciplines. Indexes major journals with all cited references captured. Combines the following citation databases: Science Citation Index Expanded; Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI); Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI); Conference Proceedings Citation Index.
- World Shakespeare Bibliography Online This link opens in a new window
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Record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide between 1960 and 2009. Contains over 122,867 annotated entries.
What about Google Scholar?
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
Since Google Scholar will give you search results including books from Google Books, articles, citations, papers in institutional repositories, etc., you will need to carefully examine the search results to see if the resource is what you need for your project. You may need to track down a print or electronic copy through UCLA library resources if the full content of the work is not available online through Google Scholar.