Many online research databases are duff. While they claim to give you exclusive access to high quality peer-reviewed articles, you often have to pay a hefty monthly or annual subscription to access written materials related to your topic.
But you’re a college student, one who probably doesn’t have enough money reserved for lunch hour snack at the canteen in college, leave alone enough to pay premium to access a journal database. Fortunately, you don’t have to pay subscription fees or deal with paywalls. There are free research journal databases where you can get high quality journal articles with the click of a button.
In this guide, we look at a list of the best databases to find research and journal articles without paying a subscription fee.
Free Research and Journal Databases
Whether you’ve started writing a dissertation proposal or you want to comment in-depth research for your undergraduate paper, here re free research and journal databases where you can find high quality, well-research, objective information:
1. Science Open
Science Open is a research and publishing network that provides access to over 74 million papers in all fields of science. Although registration is required to see the full text of articles, it you won’t pay a subscription to access scientific papers.
The advanced search option is quite extensive, allowing you to locate precisely the study you want in the shortest time possible. You can also save articles to your bookmarks for further research.
2. Education Resource Information Center
The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) allows you to search for journal articles related to education by topic. Links will take you to other websites where you may have to pay for information, but you can also search for full-text articles or limit your search to only peer-reviewed articles.
ERIC features journals, gray literature such as technical reports and white papers, and books are the primary indexing sources.
3. CORE
CORE is an interdisciplinary OA research aggregator that contains the most comprehensive collection of over 219 million open access papers. There are five million records hosted directly on CORE, while the majority the links to the full-text article is on the original publisher’s site.
CORE’s goal is simple:
The developers behind the platform invest their skills and time to make open-access publications available to everyone, wherever in the world. The platform includes extensive search functions, which you can use to limit results by publication type, year, language, journal, repository, and author, in addition to a simple keyword search.
4. Directory of Open Access Journal
The Directory of Open Access Publications (DOAJ) is a multidisciplinary, community-curated directory that provides scholars with access to high-quality peer-reviewed journals. It offers almost two million articles from 17,193 publications in its collection, which you may explore by subject or search by keyword.
Developed in 2003, DOAJ’s goal is to enhance open access to scientific articles. For the last 18 years, DOAJ has increased the exposure, accessibility, reputation, usage, and influence of excellent, peer-reviewed, open-access academic research journals worldwide, regardless of discipline, region, or language.
5. Social Science Research Network
The Social Science Research Network, sometime referred to as SSRN, is a database of publications for finding scholarly publications on 67 different social science areas.
There are more than 700,000 abstracts and 600,000 full-text papers on the site. There isn’t yet a way to search for exclusively full-text articles, but the majority of the papers on the site are free. At time of this writing, the Social Science Research Network doesn’t give you an option to limit your research to peer-reviewed articles.
6. Public Library of Science
Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a major participant in open access science. As a nonprofit organization, PLOS is dedicated to fostering openness in academic research by publishing 12 open access publications.
All PLOS material is at the greatest possible level of OA, which mean scientific publications are instantly and freely available to anybody regardless of their demography.
The Public Library of Science has four main aims: braking boundaries, ensuring open science, redefining quality, and empowering researchers. All 12 PLOS publications are peer-reviewed, and they adhere to strict ethical guidelines for research, publishing, and scientific reporting.
7. OpenDOAR Repository
The Directory of Open Access Repositories, also known as OpenDOAR, is a comprehensive database for free open access journals and papers. OpenDOAR uses Google Custom Search to crawl open access repositories all around the globe and delivers relevant research in all fields.
OpenDOAR team assesses and categorizes the repositories to ensure they satisfy quality requirements. The database’s inclusion criteria include open access content, worldwide access, and categorically suitable content.
In addition to two open access policy statements on minimum and optimal recommendations, OpenDOAR offers metadata, data, and content as well as preservation, and submission policies for repositories.
8. CIA World Factbook
Because it is not an online journal directory or repository, the CIA World Factbook differs from the other sites we described in this guide. However, it is a helpful online research database for academics across a wide range of fields.
All of the data is available for free access, and it includes statistics about every nation in the globe, arranged by category such as history, geography, and transportation.
The site includes an easy-to-navigate user interface. Also, it has a part where you can get updates on what information is accessible.
9. Digital Library of the Commons Repository
The Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) Repository is a multidisciplinary journal repository that allows users to read thousands of free and open-access papers from across the world. You may search for terms related to your topic or browse by document type, date, author, title, and more.
For increased search criteria, DCL additionally provides the Commons Comprehensive Bibliography, an image database, and a keyword thesaurus. The repository has books, book chapters, conference papers, journal articles, surveys, theses and dissertations, and working papers.
DCL advanced search includes a built-in Boolean search capabilities as well as drop-down choices for different types of searches.