Free Articles and Indexes

The Web Library: Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web Resources

Chapter One: Free Articles and Indexes

Frequently updated: last update 10-12-06 Copyright Nick Tomaiuolo 2006

Free Periodical Articles
AERA SIG Communication of Research
The American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group has assembled this list of links to 160 scholarly open access electronic journals in education.

American Memory: Nineteenth Century in Print Periodicals
From the Library of Congress: 22 periodicals covering various time periods in the 1800s. Searchable or browsable. Page images or plain text is available.

American School Board Journal
Online edition of this school administration magazine with coverage from 1997 to the present.

Biomed Central
All the original research articles in journals published by BioMed Central are immediately and permanently available online without charge or any other barriers to access. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is central to rapid and efficient progress in science and that subscription-based access to research is hindering rather than helping scientific communication.

Digital Dissertations (Proquest)
As a site visitor, you will be able to freely access the most current two years of citations and abstracts in the Dissertation Abstracts database. Retrieval often includes free 24 page PDF preview.

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are 1761 journals in the directory; 434 journals are searchable at the article level.

EdResearch Online
Produced by Australia's Cunningham Library, this database contains over 6 000 online articles from leading educational journals. Freely searchable index; option for pay-per-view articles.

Education Next: A Journal of Opinion and Research
Scholarly journal covering unabridged and abridged articles since 2001. Includes opinion essays and research reports.

Education Policy Analysis Archives
Peer-reviewed journal with coverage from 1993. Articles are international in scope and may be in Spanish, English or both.

Educational Leadership
Contains only selected articles from the print version. Coverage 1992 to the present.

Electronic Journal Miner
More of a library catalog than simply a list of websites, this product of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries assigns Library of Congress Subject Heading to its listings and provides comprehensive annotations to each electronic journal in the catalog along with a link to the journal's site. Note: Go to the Electronic Journal Miner's page to retrieve more lists of electronic periodicals.

Electronic Journals from the Digital Library/Archives, University Libraries of Virginia
31 free journals including the ALAN Review, Journal of Design Communication, Journal of Veterinary Medical Education, Science, Technology and Human Values.

FindArticles
A joint effort between LookSmart and the Gale Group Findarticles contains over three million articles from over 700 publications. The articles go back to 1998. Searching is simple keyword, and you have the option to limit your search by category. Search results are listed by relevance, with sponsored results at the top of the page and text ads on the right of article pages.
Important: Be sure to read the search help! Place a + in front of mandatory words (example: +health +maintenance +organizations)

FreeFullText (7000 scholarly periodicals that anyone may access online for FREE)

HighWire Press
HighWire Press at Stanford University develops and maintains the Web versions of important journals in biomedicine and other disciplines. A list of journals with free full-text articles online is available. 911,187 free full-text articles as of 6-4-05.

Index to Botanical Literature
An index of botanical literature written since late 1995 to date from the Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden.

Internet Library of Early Journals
ILEJ, the "Internet Library of Early Journals" was a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford, conducted under the auspices of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Program. It aimed to digitize substantial runs of 18^th century journals, and make these images available on the Internet, together with their associated bibliographic data. The project finished in 1999, and no additional material will be added. Six journals are available for browsing or searching: Annual Register, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Gentleman's Magazine, Notes and Queries, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, The Builder.

ITI Central -- free articles from Information Today
ITI-InfoCentral.com is your link to ITI's archives, from September 1987 to the present, from Information Today, ONLINE, Searcher, Computers in Libraries, EContent, EMedia/EventDV, Multimedia & Internet@Schools, CRM, and KMWorld. The collection also includes past issues of Link-Up (now incorporated into Information Today).

"Making of America" journals at Cornell University and the University of Michigan.
Cornell provides access to a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. The journal collection at UMichigan currently contains approximately 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

Magatopia
Links to 1,000 online magazines with a very basic search mechanism.

MagPortal
Find individual articles from many free magazines by browsing the categories or using the search engine.

Microsoft Live Academic
Similar to Google Scholar, this project currently indexes content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related areas (i.e., a freely searchable database of peer reviewed articles).

Northern Light"
"Northern Light," a web search engine that disappeared from the radar several years ago has finally resurfaced as the "Northern Light Business Research Engine." Though it's marketed as a business resource, you will also be able to locate plenty of articles on general topics as well. The journal search engine covers 1.3 million articles from over 1,400 publications. Other components at the site include a "Business Web" search, a News search, and a "White Papers" search. Most of the content is pay-per-view, but some items are free.

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
This is a service built by harvesting metadata from Open Archives of electronic theses and dissertations. Lists links to university electronic theses and dissertations collections; some resources are viewable, others are for parent institution use only.

Online Books Serials Page
This page lists freely accessible archives of serials (such as magazines, journals, newspapers, and other periodicals).

Ornithological Worldwide Literature
OWL is a compilation of citations and abstracts from the worldwide scientific literature that pertain to the science of ornithology. A major attraction is its coverage of the 'grey' literature, which is not abstracted by commercial databases such as Zoological Record or the Science Citation Index.

Penn Library, University of Pennsylvania, Electronic Journals
Penn's database includes links to both restricted and unrestricted access journal and articles; it also offers several search alternatives.

PolySearch Engines
These PolySearch Engines allow you to run simple queries across several open access ready reference databases or publishers’ abstract archives in one fell swoop. This is especially convenient for corroborating information in different dictionaries, and encyclopedias, and for comprehensive literature searches. Results are shown simultaneously from the sites in adjacent panes. The original query brings to you each selected target sites (instead of merging their results), so if you want to broaden or narrow the search, you can refine the simple query using truncation symbols, Boolean and proximity operators, field limiters – whatever is allowed by the native search engine of each site. Many engines are planned; the current offerings include:
Biographies PolySearch Engine , General English Dictionaries PolySearch Engine and Energy PolySearch Engine

Primedia Business Magazines
Primedia is a publisher of trade magazines as well as a provider of other business services. Its site provides searchable access to selected content from approximately 100 of the company's publications. The site also links to the publications -- the user is only one click away from the magazine's own site.

Public Library of Science
PLoS is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

Research Society for American Periodicals
The RSAP is an interdisciplinary organization of scholars interested in American magazines and newspapers. An excellent resource for historical material seekers.

Free Indexing Services
Ageline American Association of Retired Persons
Allows you to search English-language articles and books published in the United States and around the world, contains 60,000 abstracts from journal and magazine articles, government and organizational reports, and books and book chapters.

AGRICOLA
AGRICultural OnLine Access is a bibliographic database of citations to the agricultural literature created by the National Agricultural Library and its cooperators. Production of these records in electronic form began in 1970, but the database covers materials in all formats, including printed works from the 15th century. The records describe publications and resources encompassing all aspects of agriculture and allied disciplines, including animal and veterinary sciences, entomology, plant sciences, forestry, aquaculture and fisheries, farming and farming systems, agricultural economics, extension and education, food and human nutrition, and earth and environmental sciences. Although AGRICOLA does not contain the materials, thousands of AGRICOLA records are linked to online full-text documents, with new links being added every day.

ACM Digital Library Portal
The Association of Computing Machinery allows free searching of its journal database; full text usually requires subscription or payment, but some articles are available without charge if you register (free). Try it (e.g., "robots and eye contact")!

AMS: the American Mathematical Society
8,600 articles in nine online journals including over 870 free articles.

British Library Direct
Permits searching through 20,000 publications for a total of 9 million articles. An excellent free resource for indexing and abstracting. Document delivery is the objective, but the free searching is a find in itself for end-users.

Cambridge University Press Journals Online
Cambridge University Press allows searching of articles from its electronic journals by journal title, author, author affiliation, and/or keywords taken from the titles, abstracts and/or full-text. Coverage: 1990-present.

CEDB (The American Society of Civil Engineers)
The CE database provides access to over 100,000 Bibliographic and Abstracted Records - Current Coverage: 1970 - Present.

CHID (Combined Health Information Database, National Institutes of Health).
A free, searchable bibliographic database of health materials (no full text, although a link may be provided to full text of indexed government documents).

EEVL Xtra
EEVL Xtra is a free service that can help you find articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, teaching and learning resources and more, in engineering, mathematics and computing. Note: EEVL stands for Enhanced and Evaluated Virtual Library.

ERIC
Provides access to ERIC Document citations from 1966 to the present as well as ERIC Journal citations.

Geobib
The American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee provides this searchable online bibliography to the journals covered in Current Geographical Publications for 1985-1005. Current bibliographic research in the AGS journals is done by browsing TOCs.

Handbook of Latin American Studies
A little difficult to use, and don't get the wrong impression -- it is simply a keyword searchable bibliography of articles and books relating to Latin America. Coverage is 1935 to the present.

HazLit The Natural Hazards Center Library
The database contains citations to journal articles, books, and reports, in bound and electronic form. Many references also include abtracts or annotations.

Ingenta
Search 15 million articles from 28,200 publications. No free full text; this is a database to identify items. You may then locate the items in libraries or purchase them, for a fee, online.

Free EBSCO Database for Information Professionals LISTA
Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts is A selective bibliographic database covering 600 periodicals, plus books, research reports, and proceedings. Coverage dates back to the mid-1960s.

MEDLINE/PubMed
PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, provides access to over 12 million MEDLINE citations back to the mid-1960's and additional life science journals. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources.

National Criminal Justice Reference Service
Summaries of more than 180,000 criminal justice publications including: Federal, State, and local government reports, books, research reports, journal articles, and unpublished research. More than 7,000 full text documents available.

New York Review of Books
Free online index. Browse or search the NYRB archives from 1963 forward. Subscription required to access full text, but an excerpt is included.

NTIS
The National Technical Information Service is the federal government’s leading delivery outlet for scientific and technical reports, especially those produced under government contract. Some reports are displayed free of charge while others require payment (or the user pay present the bibliographic information to a library for possible fulfillment). Searchers can access the NTIS database dating to 1990 at no charge.

OSTI Energy Citations
Contains bibliographic records for energy and energy-related scientific and technical information from the Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessor agencies, the Energy Research & Development Administration (ERDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The Database provides access to DOE publicly available citations from 1948 through the present, with continued growth through regular updates.

POPLINE
POPLINE is the world's largest database on reproductive health, provides more than 300,000 citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues.

Project Euclid (Cornell University)
Free searching of 40 journals in the field of theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics. Some journals provide open access to all articles, others provide open access to some articles, others are free to search but a subscription is required to view articles.

QUAKELINE
A bibliographic database containing includes 40,000 records for various publication types, such as journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, maps, and videotapes.

Research Index (CITESEER)
Provided by the NEC Research Institute. ResearchIndex is a scientific literature digital library that aims to improve the dissemination and feedback of scientific literature, and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness.

Right-to-Know Network
RTK provides free access to numerous databases, text files, and conferences on the environment. With the information available on RTK NET, you can identify specific factories and their environmental effects and assess people and communities affected.

Scirus
Although it focuses on scientific information, Scirus may be used for many searches in a variety of disciplines. If the user desires, a Scirus search will find Web pages but, most importantly for a free Web Library, it locates references to journal articles (and displays abstracts when available).

SMEALsearch
SMEALSearch is a publicly available digital library and search engine hosted at Penn State's Smeal College of Business. SmealSearch crawls the web and harvests, catalogs, and indexes academic business documents.

TRIS Online Transportation Research Information Services from the U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The TRIS Database contains almost half a million records of references to books, technical reports, conference proceedings, journal articles and on-going research in the field of transportation. Some free full text is provided.