Librarian
Professional Organizations
- Journalism Professional Sites -- Google SearchW&L-designed, Google-based site is designed to identify about 200 important free online resources created by practitioners and scholars of journalism and related fields, usually intended to reach an audience of journalists, students, and scholars.
- Strategic Communication Associations -- Google SearchSearch important professional associations and similar groups in public relations, crisis communications, and advertising. Use the "Google Custom Search" box.
Specialized Scholarly and Professional Databases
Mostly valuable for journal and magazine articles published within the past twenty or so years, although some older articles are available.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Excellent starting point. Multidisciplinary article database offers access to more than 16,000 journals, magazines, and newspapers, including over 15,000 peer-reviewed journals.
- Communication and Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window
Provides citations to over 600 journals in communication, mass media, and related fields, as well as books, reports, dissertations, and other resources. Includes full-text articles from over 500 journals.
- SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Comprehensive coverage of sociology and its sub-disciplines, with very good coverage of related areas of study, especially politics. In addition to full-text journals, it contains informative abstracts for core coverage journals dating as far back as 1895.
- PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
The world's most comprehensive source for bibliographic coverage of psychology and behavioral sciences literature. Subjects covered include education, linguistics, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, physiology, psychiatry, sociology, and other areas.
- Legal Collection This link opens in a new window
Full-text content of more than 250 of the world's most respected scholarly law journals, covering "issues, studies, thoughts and trends of the legal world" -- constitutional law, criminal justice, environmental law, commercial law, ethical issues, etc. Chronological coverage varies among sources, with some extending back to the early 1990's.
- Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Business Source covers business journals, magazines, and newspapers. About 7,000 publications, over 2,000 of which are peer-reviewed journals, as well as other resources, including financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and more. You might try changing the "select a field" drop-down menu to "CO Company Entity" before searching for a company name.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
A digital archive of over 1,100 important scholarly journals. All issues of each journal are included in full-text except for the most recent 2-to-5 years, based on JSTOR's agreement with the journal's publisher.
Article Databases -- News Coverage
Articles in a wide range of publications, including popular, news, and opinion magazines, newspapers, and major academic/scholarly journals.
- NewsBank Access World News This link opens in a new window
Articles from 9,000+ U.S. and international full-text information sources, mostly newspapers and wire services. Able to focus a search on news sources from one region of the world or even from one U.S. state at a time.
- Westlaw Campus Research This link opens in a new window
Highly respected database covers 7,000 sources for legal information, news sources, and business research. Extensive legal coverage includes law reviews, court cases, statutes, regulations, and more. News sources feature hundreds of U.S. and international newspapers and broadcast transcripts. Business research includes Company Investigator.
Finding Articles -- Possible Starting Point
A prominent new option on the library's homepage is a database called Primo, which contains a lot of links to articles and other materials, but it does NOT provide you with access to everything to which the library subscribes. It's fine as a starting point, but probably will not adequately cover most research topics.
A sample search of "Articles Only" in Primo and limited to "peer-reviewed journals": "college student*" AND "free speech"
For coverage that focuses more on mass communication and social science journals, consult individual databases listed below.
Getting an Article's Text
In many cases, an entry in one of our databases will direct you to the complete text of an article.
But what do you do when the text is not immediately available? How do you know if we have access to an article?
This link, found in many databases, will take you to a page which will present your options, which may include (1) other databases, and/or (2) interlibrary loan.
Interlibrary Loan
This option enables W&L students and faculty to get copies of articles or other materials -- without charge -- from other libraries across the U.S. Click here to begin. (For more information, see this page.)
Does W&L Have This Magazine (or Journal or Newspaper)?
You usually can answer this question by searching our Full Text Journal List.