Search for online and campus PhD programs
Complete the form below to be matched with schools that suit your interests.
Academic research is the heart of any masters or PhD program. While graduate level students must still take courses, the bulk of their work is focused on doing original research and writing a compelling paper that they will then have to defend in front of a panel of professors or others with expertise in the field. While in-depth research was once confined to reference libraries and organizations with access to years’ worth of copies of academic journals, much of the work of original research can now be done online. Major repositories of academic research like JSTOR and LexisNexis can now be searched comprehensively online, and even Google has an easy-to-use scholarly search engine. Online libraries, journals, databases, and academic search engines are a great resource for graduate students and PhD students, as well as people at any level of education who are working on in-depth research.
The subject matter contained in these sites covers many academic disciplines, but it would be impossible to cover all of them in one list. Fortunately there are specialized academic databases and search engines for nearly any topic imaginable. This isn’t a ranked list, but a sample of many of the highest quality online resources for academic research.
Academic search engines like the ones offered by Google, Microsoft, and many academic publishing companies, don’t necessarily offer full access to published papers, but they are a great way to do preliminary research and find out what type of investigation has already been done in any academic sphere.
Google Scholar offers users a search engine to find articles, legal documents, and other scholarly pieces. They also have a great citation function that helps users track their research.
JSTOR is a subscription based academic search engine that allows users access to scholarly journals, articles, primary sources and even books. They have thousands of sources available in over a dozen categories like science, humanities, law and business.
Lexis Nexis is an online subscription based tool that helps users navigate and narrow down the overwhelming amount of information available on different topics.
Elsevier is a leading publisher of health science books and journals. They offer journal subscriptions to medical practitioners and have resources in topics such as dentistry, psychiatry, and even veterinary medicine.
Investigate Further: Journals and Clinics
Wikipedia is a user edited encyclopedia about topics from pop culture to history to television to molecular science. Free to anyone, users can flag any incorrect information and update and add new information and sources. Though it won’t serve as an actual citation in an academic paper, it is a great resource for getting a broad overview and picking a direction for further inquiry on any topic
SCIRUS is possibly the most comprehensive scientific research tool on the web, with over 575 million scientific items indexed at last count. This search tool allows researchers to search for not only journal content, but also scientists’ homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information.
Investigate Further: Advanced Search
ePsychology is full of free articles and ebooks that lend themselves to research and understanding of the foundations of psychology.
Investigate Further: Research in Psychology
The Anthropology Review Database is an easy to use search engine for those looking for anthropology publications. Users can find reviews of recent books, films, and even software and websites here, to discover titles that are relevant to their interests and worth including in their research or teaching.
Investigate Further: Guide for Users
MathSciNet is an electronic publication offering access to a carefully maintained and easily searchable database of reviews, abstracts and bibliographic information for much of the mathematical sciences literature. This database contains over 2.8 million items and over 1.6 million direct links to original articles, and over 100,000 new items are added each year.
Investigate Further: Librarians’ Resources
ipl2 is a public service and learning/teaching environment where students and volunteer library and information science professionals answer reference questions and maintain and build reference collections. Collections of resources from the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII) websites were merged in 2010 to form this resource.
Investigate Further: For Teachers & Researchers
Researchers can discover the articles they need through the ERIC search. You can search for peer-reviewed articles only, or articles that have full text instead of an abstract. You also can look for both types of articles in this multidisciplinary database.
Investigate Further: FAQ
United Academics’ goal is to connect science and society by providing a venue where academics can publish their research, where the author decides on copyright and incentive, and where the peer review becomes a test of quality rather than a barrier to publication. This site also offers a place where companies, institutes and academics can collaborate to generate new, exciting, and productive works.
Investigate Further: Blog Journal
Register to use this free search engine and you’ll end up with some amazing extra tools such as the ability to store references and to share references with peers. You also can store and search your PDFs, and make new discoveries through automated article recommendations.
Investigate Further: Everyone’s library
Microsoft Academic Search is a database filled with papers on topics that range from agricultural science to social science. Primarily a scientific database, researchers can cull information through publications, journals, organizations, and keyword searches.
Investigate Further: Environmental Sciences
Virtual Academic Resource Center is an academic search engine that provides free access to materials from the fields of psychology, philosophy, sociology, and educational services. Users can search (and submit) books, journals, and articles for use in research.
Investigate Further: Educational Sciences
If you’re looking for a search engine dedicated to academic open access web resources, BASE is what you need. Operated by Bielefeld University Library, BASE collects, normalizes, and indexes data, providing more than 50 million documents from more than 2,700 sources.
Investigate Further: BASE Search
This site is a global science gateway, which allows researchers to accelerate their scientific discovery with national and international scientific databases and portals. Multilingual WorldWideScience.org provides real-time searching and translation of globally-dispersed scientific literature.
Investigate Further: Advanced Search
This academic search engine currently is in public beta, but don’t let that stop you from searching through more than one billion documents for the information you may need for your research. Lose that information overload found through regular search engines and hone in on your topic with this tool.
Investigate Further: Search Tips
INFOMINE is a virtual gold rush or databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information at your fingertips. Built by librarians, INFOMINE even allows you to customize your searches.
Investigate Further: How to Use INFOMINE
If you need a tool to find a federal publication, this search engine might help. The catalogue for this finding tool offers the option to find a nearby Federal Depository Library that has a particular publication as well. Search by authoring agency, title, subject, and general key word, or click on “Advanced Search” for more options.
Investigate Further: Advanced Search
If you’re searching for psychology and social science journals or articles, use Psycline to find what you need. This database contains over 2,000 psychology and social science journals with an easy-to-use interface to article databases.
Library spot is a densely categorized and indexed search tool for data, academic researc, bibliographic material, and other bits of information useful in conducting research.
Investigate Further: Libraries Online
This search engine is dedicated to scientific searches, and users can make search-queries in different databases by using only 1 search field. This resource allows users to find, download, or buy scientific publications in up to 60 different databases.
Investigate Further: List of available Online Journals
Based upon the Google Custom Search engine, this search tool allows users to search contents of the repositories listed in the OpenDOAR database and use the information freely for academic research. Full texts are available for most results.
Investigate Further: Search or Browse for Repositories
VADLO provides a powerful search tool dedicated to the life sciences. Search for forums, cartoons, protocols, tools, PowerPoint presentations, and products, all geared to support any life science project. The PowerPoint presentations include biomedical and medical research.
Investigate Further: Search for PowerPoints
The Encyclopedia of Psychology offers a variety of options for support materials within their 1,726 links. Choose from the history of psychology, publications, resources, organizations, paradigms and theories, and even career options. The site can be translated into eight languages other than English.
Investigate Further: Popular Searches
Databases of academic journals typically allow users to purchase a subscription to access all the materials, or one-off access to specific papers or journal issues.
PLOS houses academic journals related to scientific research. There are journals with full text and downloadable information for pathogens, genetics, medicine, tropical diseases and more, all indexed and searchable to users.
Investigate Further: Journals
WorldCat connects users to the collections of over 10,000 libraries worldwide. Researchers can search for books, DVDS, CDs, articles, and create lists, bibliographies and reviews.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a huge collection of research, reports, reviews, and commentaries from many scientific disciplines. Their extensive, indexed archives are helpful for anyone looking for any sound, cited scientific research.
Investigate Further: About PNAS
Members of the Springer Open Access program can access their archive of journals, covering all areas of science, including very specialized disciplines.
Investigate Further: Services
The American Economic Association publishes seven economics journals and EconLit, the comprehensive database covering essential economics literature from around the world. These journals are searchable by volume for articles of interest for research or following trends.
Investigate Further: Journal of Economic Perspective
Accessible Archives, founded in 1990, is filled with primary source materials selected to reflect a broad view of historic eras. Used by educational institutions, professors, students, and genealogists, the data in this online archive is sorted with strict attention to detail to make the information easily accessible.
Investigate Further: Collections and Coverage
Statista is a statistics portal, providing users with data from over 60,000 topics from over 18,000 sources. Some of their site access is free, but some of their premium search and metrics features are for paying members only.
Investigate Further: Services
JPMS is international, open-access, peer-reviewed, online journal from Pakistan. Their searchable archives go back several years covering a number of studies and topics and their blog discusses current trends and needs in the medical field.
Investigate Further: The Need of the Hour
Archives Hub helps researches in the UK find sources and material for their projects. With access to over 220 institutions, Archives Hub helps individuals find diverse and important facts and figures.
Investigate Further: Strategy
DOAJ is a directory for open access journals, including Dovepress, Biomed, and MDPI. Their goal is to allow users access to aims to be comprehensive access to scientific and scholarly journals.
Investigate Further: FAQ
The Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), along with the Anthropology Library and Research Centre at the British Museum, publishes this Anthropological Index Online to record anthropological periodical titles dating back to 1957. This amazing piece of work, which was completed in 2000, is updated continuously.
Investigate Further: The British Museum Anthropological Library
The CERN database offers hundreds of thousands of pieces of data available for search. Users can find information experiments, periodicals, training lectures, conference announcements, progress reports, theses, photos, videos, and more.
Investigate Further: Engineering Department
The New York Public Library digital gallery provides free access to over 800,000 images. Users can search manuscripts, maps, posters, prints, and photographs by subject, author, section and more.
Investigate Further: Photographs
Use this Thomson Reuters resource to find high-impact articles, to uncover relevant results for your projects, to discover emerging trends, and to identify potential collaborators. The Social Sciences Citation Index is an ideal resource for researchers, faculty, and students, providing essential data from 3,000 of the world’s leading social sciences journals.
Investigate Further: Awards & Recognition
This non-profit science-based project consists of open source computer scientists, citizen scientists, and science writers, and advocates for Open Data, Open Access, and Open Source and Standards. The site lacks content, which currently is being updated as a yearbook — but you can learn about their projects and follow them in social media.
The OAIster databaserepresents a database consisting of millions of open access resources built by harvesting from open access collections worldwide. Today, OAIster includes more than 25 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,100 contributors.
Investigate Further: Digital Archive
Gain access to peer-reviewed full-text articles at this site, which contains more than eleven million journal articles and book chapters. Science is the thrust in this archive, with information from a catalog of more than 2,500 journals and 11,000 books.
Investigate Further: Featured Resources
Neurosurgery is a journal, but it’s also a great tool for research and documentation. The site holds podcasts, video, journal information, and current and previous issues. Additionally, Neurosurgery Report offers daily updates on journal articles, supplemental digital content, news and upcoming events.
Investigate Further: Neurosurgery Report
If your focus is on journalism, media, and cultural studies, this academic journal is right up your alley. Enjoy regular themed and open issues filled with peer-reviewed articles and responses to current cultural issues.
Investigate Further: Calls for Papers and Future Issues
CREDO supports public and academic libraries. Their primary focus is information skills – making sure students and individuals have access to up to date, valuable information skills content and education that they can bring to school and the workforce.
Investigate Further: Academic
SAGE is an independent international publisher of academic materials, both in print and online. They are known for their commitment to quality and innovation, and are world leaders in their chosen scholarly, educational, and professional markets.
Investigate Further: Reference Books
FSTA offers a food science resource that constantly monitors research and developments in the fields of food science and technology. The FSTA database is bibliographic, and includes over one million indexed abstracts with full text links when available. This database is updated weekly and covers materials from 1969 to the present.
Investigate Further: For Researchers
Cambridge University Press currently publishes over 300 peer-reviewed academic journals for the global market. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences journal is one of those publications, providing work from researchers in fields such as psychology and neuroscience.
Investigate Further: FirstView Articles
This site is a non-profit scholarly publishing cooperative that provides open access to research journals published in developing countries. Peer-reviewed journals currently in this database originated from countries such as Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Tanzania, Uganda, and Venezuela.
Investigate Further: Active Journals by Country
Medical students author, review, and publish the Medical Student Research Journal (MSRJ), making it the only academic journal in the U.S. of its kind. Dedicated to promoting the scientific achievements of medical students, MSRJ publishes original research, case studies, editorials, brief reports, reviews, and reflections that meet required standards.
Investigate Further: MRSJ Blog
The Circumpolar Health Bibliographic Database is a region specific database of bibliographic information that is administered by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Investigate Further: Contents
Academic Journal Database serves as a large index of literature covering periodical research, particularly in the areas of medical research, humanities, and social science. They index 3800 international journals and have over 1.1 million articles available through their server.
Investigate Further: Selection Criteria
Academic Index provides researchers with websites previously selected by librarians, teachers, and library and educational cosortia. This selection process offers the very best the web has to offer to academia for research, citation, and theory development.
Investigate Further: U.S. History
This site and its accompanying blog are devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research. Each SSRN network encourages early distribution of research results by publishing abstracts and papers in their databases. The Abstract Database contains over 505,500 scholarly working papers.
Investigate Further: Cognitive Science Network
Zentralblatt MATH (zbMATH) is the world’s most comprehensive and longest running abstracting and reviewing service in pure and applied mathematics. The database contains more than three million bibliographic entries with materials drawn from more than 3,000 journals and 170,000 books.
Investigate Further: Mathematical Subject Classification – MSC2010
If you need to tap into a gateway for the best science news sources, visit SciCentral, where a science team hand picks the best sources available and aggregates them for research. This service has received over 30 web awards and enthusiastic peer reviews.
Investigate Further: Databases
Artcyclopedia offers an amazing compilation of information about the arts, defining art history by name, medium, subject, nationality, female artists, and art movements. The site also offers unique tools like the “ActualSizer,” which allows viewers to examine artwork at life-size dimensions.
Investigate Further: Top 30 Artist Searches
This site provides researchers with millions of scientific documents gathered from journals, books, series, protocols, and reference works. The archives are categorized, and you can find topics that range from architecture and design to statistics.
Investigate Further: Engineering
Online libraries, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the like are perfect for gathering ancillary research materials and finding added details to shore up the quality of a work in progress.
Being one of the largest libraries in the world, the Library of Congress has no shortage of research helps. Their resource databases include quotes, image, politics, maps, as well as full text books and periodicals.
Investigate Further: FAQ
Princeton University Press Is primarily a publisher of scholarly texts. Their site offers searches of full texts, downloading of sample chapters, and ordering of ebooks and physical copies.
Investigate Further: Subjects
ALIA members can download more than 100 recent, ebooks on a number of topics. They are also eligible for research awards and excellent networking opportunities.
Investigate Further: Member benefits
This educational website has both free and membership only features. Their scholarly content – including reports, writing, and media – is peer reviewed and added to their archives for users to browse and use in research.
Investigate Further: Meet the Tarascans
This huge online library offers all of the best features of a great university library: writing help, database of trade and academic journals, and, of course, books. They also have a course guide feature which can help students find online resources, sites, and books to support them in whatever class they are in.
Investigate Further: Campus Guides Search
Ebrary is meant as alternative for students and individuals who don’t have access to libraries through their universities. Ebrary offers access to ebooks and other articles in categories like politics, biography, and more.
With over 30,000 of literary, philosophical, historical, and scientific content from around the world, The Literacy Encyclopedia offers a unique base of research and sources. Beyond just search capability, subscribers can save searches, set up timelines, get secondary search suggestions and relevant links.
Investigate Further: Bookshelves
This extensive and comprehensive reference is a catalog of all the world’s known living languages. It features some truly helpful features for studying languages, including the estimated speaker population, the genetic classification of the language, language maps, and more.
Investigate Further: Statistics
Open Library is a project that hopes to achieve one web page for every book ever published. To achieve this, their project is completely open – open software, open data; anyone can search their project and anyone can edit and add pages to the project.
Investigate Further: Julius Caesar
New World Encyclopedia considers itself somewhere between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica – consistent and scholarly, but also easy to use and flexible. Their search engine is user friendly, and many of their topics have extensive linking to other subjects for further, relevant research.
IDEAS is the largest bibliographic Internet database dedicated to the subject of economics. Search through 1,400,000 items to find what you need for your research. Hosted by the Research Dividions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, over 1,300,000 of these files can be downloaded in full text.
Investigate Further: Articles
The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. The online collections are outstanding, providing many thousands of resources from primary documents to oral histories…all available online.
Investigate Further: Digital Collections & Services
The British Library offers catalogues, collections, galleries, and services for visitors and for online viewers. This is a multilingual site that provides digital collections online and works with other libraries in the background to provide research information.
Investigate Further: Americas studies blog
Every researcher needs a library, and the Library Journal is the tool to help you weave your way among the real and virtual bookshelves. Their groundbreaking features and analytical news cover everything you need to know about the ever-evolving world of libraries.
Investigate Further: Webcasts
The Manchester Library provides an amazing resource for historians and other academics as well as genealogists. Although some materials are now on Ancestry.com, this site contains other searches that can help you learn more about your family history or that historical element that included the City of Manchester.
CILIP believes in a literate, knowledgeable, and connected society, and provides a venue for access to information and transfer of knowledge through training and products. They are the leading voice for information, library, and knowledge practitioners throughout England.
Investigate Further: Products and services
The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Library site offers videos, training, and online information about the sciences. They often share their materials online, offering projects such as the Emily Wilding Davison Online Exhibition to a global audience.
Investigate Further: Emily Wilding Davison Online Exhibition
The International Encyclopedia of Communication (ICA) is the largest international association in the communication field, and they provide an interesting encyclopedia on that topic through a patchwork of subjects, theories, and methodological approaches. Over 1,000 scholars contributed to this encyclopedia, offering their first approach to this massive project.
Investigate Further: Reviews
The Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University offers the ability to search the library’s holdings, including full-text journal articles in a single interface. The library also offers research support, subject guides, electronic databases, useful links, and online collections.
Investigate Further: Libraries and Collections
The UBC Law Library offers an amazing resource for law students, providing research resources, indexes and databases, exams and course guides, and reference services. You can search collections online and use their helpful guides, but many of the materials may be available only at the University of British Columbia.
Investigate Further: Search Collections
The authors who write and research the materials that end up in academic journals and texts can enjoy exclusive benefits of membership at TAA. There is an annual conference, publication grants, podcasts, networking opportunities, webinars, and other tools that serve the authors that keep research materials being published and printed for community use.
Investigate Further: Action issues
Scholarpedia offers an excellent resource for academics who want to disseminate expertise with a global audience. Write encyclopedic articles, share your expertise with a global audience, and supervise the development of articles in your field through collaboration and peer review.
Investigate Further: Scholarpedia Blog
UALC Was formed in 1971 to improve the availability and delivery of library and information services to the state of Utah, to partner libraries in Nevada and in Idaho, and to the higher education community at large. The amazing Digital Collections contain over 300 projects focused on the U.S. Mountain West region, with free access to over 300,000 resources.
Investigate Further: Mountain West Digital Library
The University of Baltimore’s Langsdale Library offers online searches for their vast amounts of materials. Search through articles and collections, view digital resources, dig through their databases, and try out their interlibrary loan option.
Investigate Further: Digital Collections @ University of Baltimore
Databases of historical photos and maps, and even just blogs kept on academic topics by those with expertise, can be a useful way to find new angles on subject matter that seems to have been gone over with a fine toothed comb.
The online Smithsonian Encyclopedia offers research information in a huge number of topics. For free, anyone can search their extensive collection including art and design, science and technology, and history and culture.
This daily news site covers all science, research, and technology topics, publishing over 100 quality articles every day in the areas of biology, electronics, chemistry, nanotechnology and other topics. Their readership includes scientists, researchers, and engineers.
Investigate Further: New iPhones less durable
Medlineplus is a database of medical and health information. Users can find information on conditions and questions under topics like exercise, skin conditions, and drug supplements.
Investigate Further: Videos and Cool Tools
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery is an art museum but also produces and publishes collections of photography and images. They also have an online search portrait search which searches over 100,000 American portraits.
Investigate Further: Collections
This site is user populated and infographic powered. It is easily accessible and the information is filterable.
Investigate Further: FAQ
With new blog entries nearly every day posted by prominent professors and other economics specialists, EconAcademics is a casual looking but serious minded economics blog. Hosted by the research division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, these posts offer articulate solutions to economics issues and pose interesting and thoughtful questions.
Investigate Further: Does the Internet make people happier?
The National Archives is a public government record database that houses information such as military and veteran listings and service records and genealogies. Users can also browse old historic documents, pictures and access other educational materials.
Investigate Further: Education
The Inspec database has over 13 million abstracts and indexing to the quality research in the field of engineering. It’s perfect resource for physics and engineering students and professionals
Investigate Further: Journals
The NBER has one basic goal – helping people understand how the economy works. Their site offers the public papers and publications, data, and articles that show past and current trends in the American economy that are useful for research or questions.
Investigate Further: What Determines International Wages and Prices?
iThenticate is an anti-plagarism tool. It’s great for teachers who want to make sure their students are using content from their sources correctly, especially since it is already linked with so many regularly used and cited academic journals.
Investigate Further: Content
Theses, dissertations and research publications (including journal articles, conference abstracts and books) from Lund University are collected in this database. Users can search by keyword, department, or full title.
Gooru allows teachers to search for and find free classroom resources. They can search by subject – math, social studies, etc. – and organize their collected materials online.
Investigate Further: Gooru in the Classroom
Oregon State offers a site that both introduces the kinds of technologies being used in classrooms, their benefits, and also lists webinars for training and teaching of these tools. This site is a good source not only for researching what new technologies might be available in classrooms, but also as a starting point for getting trained in some of them for use in the classroom.
Investigate Further: How to use Blogs and Wikis
Student Hive considers student research as a social network. Students can organize their work and research, share data, and also use each other to find information on the web.
The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 25 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. Users can browse the entire online collection of over 30,000 images or search by keyword for specific images.
Investigate Further: View Collection
Ben Vision research is studying the sciences and technologies in the field of eye care. Their research publications and presentations are listed on their site for use in research.
Investigate Further: Technology Summary
Science.gov provides instant access to over 55 science databases. Searches can be done by keyword, or through categories such as biology and nature, astronomy, food and agriculture, and the ocean.
Investigate Further: Meet the Meteorologists
The arXiv eprint Archive provides open access to over 800,000 eprint articles in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, finance, and statistics from the Cornell University Library. Their simple search feature allows all users to easily browse through these archives.
Investigate Further: Galaxy Astrophysics
Merriam-Webster has enjoyed over 150 years as America’s leading and most-trusted provider of language information. Now, this resource is online, offering guidance to more than 40 million visitors who seek help with English language definitions and pronunciations.
Investigate Further: Word of the Day
OUP Blog provides commentary on a daily basis on nearly every subject known to mankind. From current affairs to science and medicine and from language and humanities to arts and leisure, this blog offers a superb environment for learning, understanding, and reflection.
Investigate Further: Prospects for China’s migrant workers
The American Library Association chose this site as the “Best Free Reference Web site 2010,” since References contains the web’s largest resource for references and resources. A multidisciplinary directory, this site offers answers to some of the simplest or the most complex questions.
Investigate Further: Check out our Power Tools!
The Annals of Botany (AoB) and AoB Plants, both peer-reviewed journals published by Oxford University Press, are the topics for this academic blog. AoB Plants is an open-access online journal focused on biology, while the AoB is published monthly in a magazine format with online viewing of articles from 2011 and 2012.
Investigate Further: Review: Kingdom of Plants 3D
Complete the form below to be matched with schools that suit your interests.