Research databases are an organized collection of resources, such as scholarly journals, periodicals, peer-reviewed articles, newspapers, eBooks, or media, available to users online. They are a powerful tool providing students the ability to craft, modify, and limit search results to find credible information.
Archer Library, as a member of OhioLINK, provides students with access to database collections from vendors such as EBSCO and JSTOR. These proprietary resources are restricted; off campus use requires login with AU credentials.
Academic Search Complete, designed specifically for academic institutions, is the world's most comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database supporting high-level research for academic study. It provides access to more than 5,800 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals.
Contains over 3 million records devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral sciences and mental health. Includes abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations. Journal coverage includes international material selected from over 2,500 periodicals in dozens of languages.
Education Full Text is a research database for education students, professionals and policymakers. It includes a selection of active full-text education journals that cover the essentials of education and related fields of study, including in-depth coverage of special education.
Covers scholarly research and information relating to all areas of education, including educational specialties, testing, curriculum instruction, administration, policy, funding, and related issues
Environment Complete is a leading full-text database for environmental studies. It provides hundreds of top environment journals covering ecosystem ecology, energy, environmental policy, sustainability and other related subjects. includes full text for many of the most used journals in the discipline.
This resource covers all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more.
Science Reference Source provides full text for hundreds of science magazines, journals, reference books and high-quality videos. The database also contains science experiments, curriculum-aligned lesson plans, and a vast image collection.
"At it’s most fundamental Open Access is when publications are freely availble online to all at no cost and with limited restrictions with regards reuse" (Springer, 2023).
"Open access is a publishing model for scholarly communication that makes research information available to readers at no cost, as opposed to the traditional subscription model in which readers have access to scholarly information by paying a subscription (usually via libraries)" (Open Access, n.d.).
Your paper three assignment for The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, requires at four or more different sources "which must be academically reputable (i.e. avoid an overuse, if any use, of websites, although online academic journals are acceptable sources)" (Waterman, 2024).
If researching online, open access journals may be part of your search results. With websites to be used in a limited manner, it is useful to know how to identify an online academic journal that is not part of a database. Archer Library's A to Z List includes open access resources, such as:
DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone. Search indexed journals and articles
SSOAR collects and archives literature of relevance to the social sciences and makes it available in open access on the Internet in accordance with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) is an online digital library providing unlimited access to more than 1.3 million bibliographic records for education resources. it includes Indexed documents include journal articles, books, research syntheses, conference papers, technical reports, policy papers, and other education-related materials
PubMed® comprises more than 37 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
Other publishers offer open access databases and journals as well.