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Journal Article Indexes and Bibliographic Databases
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 windowA 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.
- Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) This link opens in a new windowABELL indexed periodical articles, books, reviews, dissertations, and essays on English language, literature, bibliography, and related topics. Published 1920-2007.
- ATLA Religion Database This link opens in a new windowIndex to journal articles, book reviews, and collections of essays in all scholarly fields of religion; includes articles written in 36 languages.
- Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender IndexFeminae covers journal articles, book reviews, and essays in books about women, sexuality, and gender during the Middle Ages. Because of the explosion of research in Women's Studies during the past two decades, scholars and students interested in women during the Middle Ages find an ever-growing flood of publications.
- International Medieval Bibliography This link opens in a new windowInterdisciplinary 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
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 windowSearchable 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).
- Literature Online This link opens in a new windowAlso known as LION. An array of literary databases (including the full text of poems, plays, and fiction), reference works (including bibliographies, encyclopedias, etc.), and links to other Web resources for the study of literature. The complete text of journal articles is available on the database for all or some of the journals indexed. Fully searchable texts of over 250,000 works in English and American Literature.
- Gale Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new windowBiographies, bibliographies, and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline. Covers more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers. Combines the core Gale Group literary databases: Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and Dictionary of Literary Biography. Complements Literature Criticism Online.
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new windowIndexes worldwide publications on literature, language, linguistics, folklore, film, television, and theater from 1923 to the present. See also the MLA Directory of Periodicals.
- Periodicals Archive Online (PAO) This link opens in a new window
Full text access to international, scholarly literature in the arts, humanities and social sciences journals from the first issue to 2005 or ceased date that indexed are in the Periodicals Index Online. This is a static collection, and there may be some missing issues/gaps for specific titles.
- Periodicals Index Online (PIO) This link opens in a new windowIndex to articles published in over 7,000 periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences, covering the period 1665-1995. Full text of many articles can be found in Periodicals Archive Online.
- Philosopher's Index This link opens in a new window
Provides indexing and abstracts from books and journals of philosophy and related fields. Covers ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy, political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysic logic as well as material on the philosophy of law, religion, science, history, education, and language.
- Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
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
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.
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.