By Maria Dragosin
Throughout your SSMS journey, you will write several academic reports. All of them are on different subjects that may be new to you, but one thing they all share is the importance of academic literature. Finding peer-reviewed academic articles or books, or at the very least grey literature sources is a tedious task. We all tried the Google Scholar route, but sometimes, the books or articles are not fully available due to copyright or other reasons. This article aims to be a guide for improving the experience of searching relevant literature and maybe allow you to free up some of the time spent on finding an article you can read fully.
First, some websites, resources, and indexes allow their use for free without requesting payment for the articles. They aim to provide open access to academic literature for one’s research.
DOAB – Directory of Open Access Books. This resource provides around 80,000 academic peer-reviewed books as of writing this article. Their number should increase because DOAB continuously adds more direct links to the full texts of the publications to their database. All the books available on this resource are “free-to-share” making it easier to access the wished publication.
DOAJ: Digital Library is an index containing diverse open-access international journals and articles on more searched topics and more obscure ones. They provide academic articles in different languages, with the vast majority in English. There are some limitations regarding the opening of some articles. Even so, the websites hosting these articles seem to be the cause of these issues. When this happens, you should try to access the hosting website and search for the journal or article there.
NIH – National Library of Medicine – PubMed Central (PMC) may be the strangest addition to this list. In contrast to all the other resources mentioned in the article, which are related to different subjects, this resource is a full-text archive of topics in biomedicine and life sciences. They have articles on international issues, providing insight into the mental or physical health of different victims, among many other health subjects.
Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD). This tool provides open access to graduating theses and dissertations papers, most of which are free to read. For several articles, there will be the need to follow copyright rules, some of which are available in different languages from over 11000 international universities and research institutions. Other sites that provide similar works are NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations), Proquest Theses and Dissertations (PQDT), and ETDs – Global Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Search. The latter of which contains more unique and valuable sources of scholarly information.
Internet Archive – Wayback Machine. Sometimes, throughout your research, you will encounter articles, journals, primary source releases, and other resources that got removed with time. The Wayback Machine enables you to turn back time to see how websites looked like in the past and the content they used to have there. Given that it was founded in 1996, you can only go back to that year. Even so, it is a perfect tool to help you recover some seemingly lost knowledge pieces.
Next, some websites are free to access through your university account. They are not free from limitations, but they can still be of help. Also, do not forget that even without the ability to use the student account, you can still request the university’s library to order certain books and publications in advance.
THUAS Library. If you are looking for one of the books used for a course or other books on topics related to them, you can first try to access the university’s Library and search for it. The website offers you information on the number of books available.
Sage Journals Home. This is a new database added by THUAS to the pool of resources. By using a university account, you can access academic articles on safety and security-related subjects such as politics, crisis management, business continuity, and many more. Remember that more obscure topics may be more difficult to find, or they may not be available at all.
ScienceDirect is one of the best platforms for research, which we access through our university accounts. This database contains peer-reviewed full-text academic articles, which helps research more efficiently. Even without an account, it does offer an “Open Access” filter type that contains several interesting articles, books, and textbooks. There are, of course, some journals or issues that are still not available through our institution, but because of the partnership between them and THUAS, you can request a digital copy or hard book cover through the university library.
Last, there are those resources not covered by a partnership of our university, but which still provide many interesting academic sources.
Academia.edu is a tool that provides full-text academic articles written by researchers, experts in the field, and fellow students. This website aims to provide open access to academic literature. Its interface may seem more difficult at first. Even so, you can operate it by creating a free account without upgrading to a premium one.
JSTOR. This website is one of the largest databases, providing over 12 million journal articles, books, images, and other primary sources for many of the subjects of interest of SSMS. Unfortunately, our university does not have a partnership with them to gain complete access. A workaround is to create a personal JSTOR account and read up to 100 articles free per month. Of course, not all articles will be fully available, but their abstracts should be free to view.
SpringerLink. Another good resource for finding academic articles, especially those published by Springer, Apress, Discover, and many others.
Taylor & Francis Online: Open Journals is an impressive library providing millions of peer-reviewed journal articles published under the big names of Taylor & Francis, Routledge, and Dove Medical Press. This website allows a student to search for sources of interest offering a full abstract to all their articles and even some full-text ones using the “Open Access” filter.
Few things come for free in this world, and, for those that do, you must put in the effort. All these resources are best used by combining them. You can always try to search for an article that is not openly available on any of these websites on Chrome with the “filetype:pdf” prompt to increase your chances of being able to use them for your research. Lastly, remember that it is important to accredit the writers who put in the work to provide you with research, just as you always accredit yourself and/or your teammates on an individual or group report.
Links to all resources mentioned:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc
https://vsmart.hhs.nl/iguana/www.main.cls?surl=Search#
https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.hhs.nl/search/advanced
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