Recommended Journals
These journals are recommended by Dr. Colven. Most journal homepages will have a search box, allowing you to search the journal's contents.
Area Studies
Business and Economics
- Business Source EliteBusiness, management, economics, banking, finance, and accounting. Materials indexed include scholarly and peer-reviewed journals. Some full text available.
Geography, including Human Geography
- SocINDEX (Ebsco)Sociology and other social and behavioral sciences. References to or full text of journal and magazine articles, reviews, trade publications, dissertation, books, and conference papers.
History Databases
- America: History and Life (Ebsco)U.S. and Canadian topics, prehistory to the present. References to or full text of journal articles, books, book reviews, dissertations, etc.
- Historical Abstracts (Ebsco)World history (except the U.S. and Canada), 1450 to the present. References to or full text of journal articles, books, book reviews, dissertations, etc.
- History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Ebsco)References to or full text of journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book reviews, dissertations, and more.
Databases
Besides looking directly in recommended journals, try searching databases. Articles from journals from many different disciplines may be relevant to your topic.
- Databases by subject area (also see the Research Guides home page):
Environmental Science
- Annual Review of Environment and ResourcesJournal that synthesizes research literature and identifies the principal contributions in the field.
- Natural Science CollectionSearches across multiple ProQuest science databases. If the results are too heavy on the hard sciences, look at the left hand side facets, click the down arrow next to the "database" facet, click "more" and then check the boxes to include environmental databases.
International Affairs and Political Science
Multidisciplinary Databases
- Academic Search Complete (Ebsco)Multidisciplinary database. References to or full text of journal and magazine articles, major newspaper articles, book reviews, and more.
- Google ScholarGoogle Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
When off campus, be sure to access Google Scholar settings > library links > type in University of Oklahoma. - JSTORIncludes the full text and complete archives of core scholarly journals in many disciplines, some dating from the 1600s. Current issues may not be available.
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global (was Dissertation Abstracts)Millions of searchable citations to dissertations and theses from 1861 to the present day together with over a million full-text dissertations that are available for download in PDF format. Includes UK & Ireland content.
NOTE: Many universities have started archiving dissertations locally rather than through this database. Try a search in Worldcat, note the name of the institution where the dissertation was written, and go to that institution's catalog to see if a copy is in a local repository.
Most OU dissertations are full text through summer 2013; after that date, find OU dissertations in SHAREOK. - Web of Science (Clarivate)Multidisciplinary database. Includes a "cited reference" search. (A type of search that allows you to find articles that cite a previously published work.)
Popular vs Scholarly
If you are not familiar with scholarly publications, it can be difficult to tell the difference between scholarly and popular periodicals. There are no definitive rules for distinguishing between the two, but here are some guidelines:
Scholarly (e.g., academic journals):
- Are written by professionals within an academic field or discipline.
- Contain research projects, methodology, and theory.
- Have few, if any, advertisements.
- Use college-level or specialized vocabulary of the discipline.
- Include articles with extensive bibliographies, footnotes, or other documentation.
- Graphics are often tables, charts, and diagrams.
- Are peer-reviewed or refereed.
- A simple explanation of peer review: other scholars in the field have evaluated a work. Check a journal's website to see what it says about the peer review or referee process. See this page, for example.
- NOTE: Even though many databases allow you to limit by peer review, it's not a guarantee that every article so limited will actually be a peer reviewed research article. Peer reviewed journals also contain non peer reviewed content such as book reviews and editorials.
Popular (e.g., magazines, newspapers):
- Are written by journalists.
- Contain general news articles written to inform, update, or introduce a new issue.
- Have many full-color, full-page advertisements.
- Use a general, non-technical vocabulary.
- Include articles with little or no documentation.
- Graphics are often full-color pictures and illustrations.