English 201 Research in the Disciplines

Once you have selected a topic and made a list of keywords, you are ready to begin searching for relevant articles. While it is possible to find some scholarly articles on the Internet using a search engine such as Google, many scholarly articles are not freely available to the public. To provide students access to these articles, the Rutgers Libraries subscribe to many Databases that contain scholarly research.

This page highlights how to choose relevant databases for your search and how to access them through the Rutgers University Libraries.

• Watch the video, "Choosing a Database".
• Multidisciplinary Databases (see below) are a good place to start if you don't know which subject area your topic may fit. It can be useful to start with a multidisciplinary search and then go into the subject-specific databases. 
• Select one of the subjects listed below under "Subject Databases" to identify and access subject-specific databases relevant to your area of study.

You may want to begin searching in one of the multidisciplinary databases below before searching a subject-specific database.

Academic Search premier: A multi-disciplinary database covering nearly every area of academic study. "Choose databases" to search across multiple EBSCO databases at the same time for more relevant results.

Google Scholar: Searches across a wide range of scholarly literature from academic publishers, professional societies, university repositories, and other scholarly websites. Helpful for citation tracing.

JSTOR: A platform for journals, books, and primary sources in a wide variety of subject areas in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

Project Muse: A platform for scholarly journals and ebooks in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Fields covered include cultural studies, economics, education, gender studies, history, political science, literature and literary criticism, visual and performing arts, and others.

ProQuest Social Science Premium Collection: The parent collection that  contains all social sciences content available through ProQuest. It covers anthropology, criminology, economics, education, international relations, library science, linguistics, political science, public policy, social work, sociology, and more.

Scopus: Abstracts and citations of peer-reviewed literature covering the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Science Direct: Major academic journals and ebooks in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and humanities.

Web of Science: Index of the world's leading scholarly journals, books, and proceedings in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities.

Wiley Online Library: Journals, books, and reference sources in a wide range of subject areas.

To locate databases relevant to your field of study, select one of the disciplines from the table below.

Don't see your field of study listed? See All Databases and click on Subject to find a database that covers your research area.