Journal articles

Use journal articles when you need original research on a specific topic from a reliable source.

Many academic journals are “peer-reviewed” which means they have been checked by academic experts to make sure they are reliable. Scholarly journals take less time to publish than books, so they’re often a good way to identify the latest thinking on a topic.

There are several ways that you might find a journal article, our journals guide shows each of these so you can decide what suits you best.

If you are conducting a literature review for a significant piece of research then you will probably want to use databases and bibliographies to search for multiple journal articles at once. Below is a list of suggested databases for you to use.

Journal databases with a history topic focus

More generalist databases with good coverage of history topics

These include:

  • JSTOR provides access to journals, book and primary sources including archives of many small publishers and independent journals. Please note that JSTOR often holds only older journal issues and that newer materials will be available through other databases.
  • Web of Science includes 200 core history titles
  • Zetoc gives access to over 36,000 journals and more than 59 million article citations
  • Journal Archives includes titles especially relevant for History of Science, but also has good general coverage
  • Periodicals Archive Online contains over 700 humanities journals comprising more than 3 million articles and 15 million article pages.

Browsing Journals

You might also find it useful to browse the journal series relevant to a place, subject or period.

Use BrowZine to select or search for a specific historical topic i.e Medical History.

You can then browse through articles and even set up an alert for new issues if this is an area you are tracking in your research.