General and Subject-specific Databases
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Scholarly, multi-disciplinary database covering thousands of journals and other publications. Includes full-text access to peer-reviewed journals, and indexing/abstracts for magazines, monographs, reports, and conference proceedings.
- America: History and Life This link opens in a new window
Contains citations to articles on the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Covers over 2,000 journals published worldwide. Includes selected historical journals from major countries, state and local history journals, and a targeted selection of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities.
- Communication Source (including Communication Abstracts) This link opens in a new window
Full-text research database for communication studies. Offers hundreds of top communication journals, magazines and other sources covering all related disciplines, including media studies, linguistics, speech pathology, rhetoric and discourse.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Includes full text of journals and books in a wide range of subject areas. Also includes high-quality primary sources and images from around the world, including artworks, maps, photographs, and more (including those from Artstor).
- Oxford Handbooks in Philosophy This link opens in a new window
Brings together the world's leading scholars to discuss the latest thinking in a range of major topics in philosophy. Includes thorough introductions to topics in the discipline and a useful reference resource for scholars and advanced students.
- PhilPapers – Philosophical Research Online This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive index of philosophy books and articles. Note: Non-UCSB users can access an open-access version of PhilPapers without authentication. However, UCSB-affiliated users will enjoyed enhanced access through the main database link.
- PsycArticles This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text articles of journals from the American Psychological Association, the APA Educational Publishing Foundation, the Canadian Psychological Association, and Hogrefe & Huber. Includes all material from the print journals with the exception of advertisements and editorial board lists.
- SAGE Journals Online This link opens in a new window
Indexes full text journals from SAGE. Includes bibliographic records, abstract, and the complete text of each journal article. Journals cover topics in area studies, ethnic and gender studies, humanities, health sciences, materials science and the social sciences.
How to retrieve the articles?
More Discovery Tools
- Google Scholar can be useful for finding obscure or incomplete citations.
- We usually recommend the library's subscription databases instead of Google Scholar because subject coverage and searchability are superior.
Scholarly and Popular Articles
There is a big difference between scholarly journals (peer-reviewed) and popular magazines in academic research. The handout below shows the basic characteristics of each source.