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Academic Books and Articles on the Internet

Although there is little free full text material available on the Internet, the net can be a good starting place to find scholarly books and articles. It is an especially good place to look if GALILEO has not worked, your access to GALILEO is limited, or for a topic in the physical sciences.

Remember very little, if any, of the current scholarly material on the net is available full text due to copyright restrictions, so that most searches will end with either an interlibrary loan request or a trip to a nearby academic library.

Search engines do not work particularly well for academic material since they fail to screen out scholarly sources from term paper mills, etc... Fortunately, there are article reference databases and reasonably local library catalogs freely available.

Databases of References to Articles.

Ingenta Connect (formerly CARL Uncover)
This non-fulltext database is one of the biggest and most current periodical databases anywhere, and access to the references is free to any one, any time, anywhere. Ingenta is especially strong in the physical sciences and business. Note: full text access to articles through Ingenta is NOT free, but your local library can obtain these articles via interlibrary loan and the references are stunningly accurate.

Google Scholar
This search engine retrieves a mixture of book and article citations. It offers to find the library location for the books. The citations come from a variety of databases, including Ingenta Connect, and are not full text. So far Google Scholar works better with the sciences than it does for the humanities or language and literature. Google Scholar is still in beta, so results may vary as development continues.

Local Academic Library Catalogs

To find material in the books and media at Columbus State University's library, please use GIL. If you cannot find material at Columbus State, the web offers other options.

Aubiecat
Indexes books and journal titles in Auburn University's collection. At thirty miles away, Auburn is the closest large academic library. Though Columbus State University students do not have borrowing privileges, they may walk in the door and use most resources.

GIL Universal Catalog
A book and journal title catalog for the entire University System of Georgia. This includes large academic libraries in Atlanta as well as the University of Georgia and Georgia Medical College. Currently enrolled students at Columbus also have borrowing privileges through GIL Express which is part of the Universal Catalog. (See also the instructions for using GIL Express at CSU.) Others must use their local libraries or travel to the libraries that have the material.

Selected Full Text Journals Examples

Here are listed some full-text, online, scholarly journals that are available. You may also want to look at our online subject resource guides for more online journals. Note that some full-text providers require installation of plugins such as Acrobat Reader or DejaVu.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Ten years or more worth of dry, technical, scholarly, and authoritative biology articles in full text often with illustrations and charts. The site has a searchable index and a browsable archives that extends back more than ten years.

American Family Physician
Five years worth of full text medical articles complete with illustrations and charts. There is a searchable index and the ability to browse articles by issue.

Australian Journal of Communication
Over ten years worth of full image articles on communication from the Australia and New Zealand Communication Association. Articles are accessed by browsing the table of contents.

Communication Reports
Several years worth of full image, peer reviewed articles on communication from the Western State Communication Association (U.S.). Articles are accessed by browsing the table of contents.

Journal of the Association for History and Computing
Peer-reviewed, fully online (no print version) journal. Articles are currently accessed by browsing a table of contents or through a cumulative index. A search engine is available, but it currently searches the entire web site, not just the journal.

Also of Note

Infomine
A search engine that covers ONLY academic sources. Sources have subject headings and listings include descriptions of each source. Note: many of the full text journals indexed at Infomine are NOT free.

Back to Searching for and Evaluating Internet Sources.

EHK -- January 2005