Articles

  • Much scholarly, historical research is published in journal articles.
  • The following indexes are particulary helpful when you want focus your searching on scholaly journals in the field of history.
  • None of the indexes are completely comprehensive for all historical research, so read the descriptions that describe the scope before selecting an index to search.

Core databases

America: History and Life
Coverage: 1964-present. Index to historical research covering the United States and Canadian history from prehistory to the present. Abstracts summarizing the articles are included. Useful for finding out which history journals have articles on your topic. Entries usually include abstracts. Book reviews included.

Historical Abstracts
Coverage: 1969-present. Index to historical research focusing on regions outside the U.S. and Canada, and covering the time period from 1450 to the present. Provides access to journal articles as well as some other research formats.

Subject-Specific History Databases

Handbook of Latin American Studies
Annotated bibliography of scholarly works focusing on Latin America. Created by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress.

History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Coverage: 1975-present. International bibliography covering the history of science, technology, and medicine. Covers pre-history to the present.

International Medieval Bibliography Online
Covers all aspects of medieval studies within the date range of 400 to 1500 for the entire continent of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for the period before the Muslim conquest and parts of those areas subsequently controlled by Christian powers.

ITER, Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Index to scholarly inforation for the study and teaching of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700).

Victorian Database Online
Covers all aspects of British Victorian Studies between the years 1830 and 1914. Interdisciplinary in scope, it lists editions, books, dissertations, and articles published in more than 500 journals. Coverage years: 1945 to present.

Other Interesting Sources for Journal Articles in History

JSTOR
Coverage: Starts with earliest issues; ends about 5 years before present date. Full text database that makes available journal issues electronically, back to the earliest issues published. Includes only a small number of journals in each subject area, but they are journals of high quality. Searching can include not only terms from author/title, but also words from the full text of the article.

Web of Science
Multi-disciplinary database of academic journals. Includes three databases which can be selected independently: Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, and Science Citation Index. In most cases, the history research falls in the Social Sciences or Arts and Humanities portions. Use the General search to look for subjects that might span multiple disciplines. Use the Cited Ref search to search to look up an article or book of interest, and find out who later cited that particular work.

CRIS : The Combined retrospective index set to journals in history, 1838-1974
D. H. Hill Jr. Ref. Z6205 .C18
Use this index if you are trying to locate older articles -- that is, articles published prior to time periods covered in the electronic indexes.