Journal articles are the cutting edge of academic dialogue about their given subject. They are a useful and necessary resource for nearly all academic research papers.
Articles from academic journals today are indexed in databases. This means we can go to a database, search by keyword, and find related articles from a broad range of journals indexed within that database. Often, we can then download the full-text article directly from the database.
BU subscribes to over 500 databases, ranging from general academic databases (ex: JSTOR) to subject databases in everything from art to medicine to sociology.
Below, you'll see some recommended databases for this particular course, alongside some helpful search tips. You can also visit our STH Library Databases page for more ideas.
An index to journal articles, essays, and book reviews in the field of religion. Covers biblical studies, world religions, church history, and religious perspectives on social issues.
The Philosopher's Index indexes and abstracts books and 350 journals of philosophy and related interdisciplinary fields published in the U.S. and other western countries. Major philosophy journals in other languages are included since 1967.
Accessed via Web of Science, this database provides comprehensive data on bibliographic & citation information. Researchers can identify which later articles have cited any particular earlier article, or have cited the articles of any particular author, or have been cited most frequently. Searches notable and significant journals across more than 25 disciplines.
A separately searchable component of Web of Science, this citation index covers conference literature in all fields of social sciences, arts, and humanities.
Journal Citation Reports allows users to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from science and social science journals from publishers in more than 80 countries. It shows research influence and impact at the journal and category levels, and the relationship between citing and cited journals.
Social Sciences Citation Index, accessed via Web of Science, provides comprehensive data on bibliographic and citation information. This database allows a researcher to identify which later articles have cited any particular earlier article, or have cited the articles of any particular author, or have been cited most frequently. Searches notable and significant journals across more than 50 disciplines.
This database is a core general science resource, covering all aspects of scientific literature. It also has a number of tools that make it a unique resource for finding scholarly literature. Item records come with links both to the works cited by the paper in question and the future works that cite that paper. Web of Science also allows the user to set up email alerts for specific authors or topics, provides researcher profiles, and to use associated journal metrics provided by the vendor.
