InfoGuides: Avoid Paywalls! Keeping Up with Literature in Your Field: Frequently Used Databases

Popular Databases

Most resources are interdisciplinary and contain a variety of formats, including streaming video media, peer reviewed articles, popular journals, music, diaries, play scripts, newspapers, reference resources, e-books, conference reports, extensive citation index from Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) and much more. Where do you start your research? This list is a good guide for preliminary topic exploration.

Responsive Design provides access by phone, tablet and desktop for most resources, except as noted.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
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Interdisciplinary, Academic Search Complete
Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
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Covers scholarly journals for business topics such as marketing, management, human resources, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Includes author profiles, financial data, books, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, company profiles, SWOT analyses, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, datamonitor, and country reports from 1886.
Tutorial for the Business Source Complete database.
Education Database This link opens in a new window
Gives users access to over 900 educational publications, including more than 600 of the titles in full text from 1988 to present. Coverage spans the literature on primary, secondary and higher education as well as special education, home schooling, and adult education.
Tutorial for the Education Database.
Factiva News Pages This link opens in a new window
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Supplies international business and news coverage from more than 8,000 sources including newspapers, newswires, magazines, trade journals, radio and television transcripts, and websites. View a tutorial on this database here.
Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
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Provides an interactive research environment that allows researchers to cross-search multiple Gale collections including Eighteenth Century and Nineteenth Century collections, Making of Modern Law, and other Archives products and to discover and analyze content in new ways.
IEEE Xplore This link opens in a new window
ebooks, journals, conference proceedings for computing and engineering
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Journals, humanities, social sciences, sciences; digitized in most cases back to the first date of issue
Nursing & Allied Health Database This link opens in a new window
Offers comprehensive coverage of the fields of nursing, allied health, alternative and complementary medicine, and more; covers journals, video, dissertations, and reference books. Tutorial for Nursing & Allied Health database.
OVID This link opens in a new window
Biological Abstracts, Health and Psychosocial Instruments, Philosopher's Index, and Transport Database
Oxford University Press Journals This link opens in a new window
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Humanities, social sciences, and the sciences.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
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Digital humanities & social science, books & journals from university presses and scholarly societies
ProQuest Research Library This link opens in a new window
General (interdisciplinary)
PubMed Central This link opens in a new window
Provides a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM); repository for articles deposited by participating publishers as well as author manuscripts. Tutorial for the PubMed Central database.
Sage Journals Online This link opens in a new window
Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science, Technology and Medicine
ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window
Interdisciplinary journal collection (app)
Springer LINK This link opens in a new window
Computer science, engineering, humanities, social sciences, law, business and economics, biomedical and life sciences
Taylor and Francis Online This link opens in a new window
Humanities, medicine, the social sciences, science, and technology
Wiley Online Library This link opens in a new window
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Sciences, social sciences, business, education, law, computer science and technology

Complete List of Databases

Mason Libraries' Research Databases by subject
Mason Libraries' Research Databases by type

Custom Alerts using Databases

Once you have discovered a search query that produces results, some databases can save the search and email updates when results are added. Schedule personalized research assistance with one of our subject librarians to help save a customized search that will provide on-going updates, as the database receives information matching your criteria or try out saved search alerts directly with a few examples of interdisciplinary resources.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
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To save a search as an alert, 1) sign-in; 2) Share; 3) Create an alert; 4) Email.
ProQuest Research Library This link opens in a new window
To save a search as an alert, 1) sign-in; 2) run a search; 3) Saved search/Alert; 4) Email.