What Are the Best Libraries, Databases, and Resource Hubs for Student Essays and Theses?
In this blog, I will write about the best online and offline resources and sites for your research. Whether you are based in the US or located internationally, there are some sites and resources that are common and relevant for all researchers. These online and offline libraries and catalogs have the best resources, journals and articles for your research topic or paper. There are journal databases that are very important for a researcher as these databases have a repository of information. A journal database can comprise of thousands of journals and millions of journal articles. Instead of looking up journal databases, you can actually visit public libraries in your neighborhood to look up sources that are necessary for your research.There are websites that are very useful for your research and in this article, I will provide a list of resources, websites, libraries and databases that you must use for your paper or thesis.
Offline Sources
Within the US, there are some very resourceful and useful places you can visit to find your research data or sources. There are public libraries in almost every state and school libraries are more than helpful when you need to locate sources for your quick research. The first place to turn to would be your school library. Generally the school library will have all the resources you seek for your study or relevant to your research. If there are sources missing in your school library, you can turn to your local library, the public library or the internet to collect or seek your sources. Offline sources are actual books or journal articles that are available in the school or state libraries. It is also possible to look up the catalogs and refer to physical paper sources such as official documents, white papers, government press releases, old magazines, newspapers and books or scholarly sources and journals. Offline sources could be any physical sources that you refer to and you could actually collect data or other information from individuals or participants for your research and this will comprise of primary data sources. Once you have the primary data sources, you have the basis for your research as you can build your paper based on the data you collected.The best libraries in the US are the school libraries and if you have library cards for your state or public libraries, those libraries also have significant collection of books, journals and other resources.
Some of the best libraries in the US are the Ben May, Arabian, Giesel, Rodolfo Gonzales, Yale library, Hockessin, Gulf Gate, Georgia State, Hawaii State, Coeuer D'Alene, Chicago Public library, Indianapolis central, Iowa State law library, lawrence public library, William T Young library, East Baton Rouge Parish, Portland Public library, George Peabody, Boston Public library, University of Michigan, Minneapolis central, Mississippi library commission, Kansas city public library, Billings library, Nebraska state, Prim, Phillips Exeter Academy, Julian Street, Farmington, North Dakota State, William Oxley, Ashland Public, Fisher Fine Arts, Fleet library, Hot Springs Public library, Nashville, Oak forest and Salt lake City library. If you live or work near any of these libraries, you may consider getting a membership or visiting these for your research sources. However, your school library or the nearest public library should always be your first choice when it comes to looking up sources for your research.
Online Sources
Online databases are also equally useful for your research and there are at least a few hundred online journal databases that could help you with your research paper. Some of the journal databases and research or paper sources are ingentaconnect, sciencedirect, JSTOR, pubmed, Google scholar, BASE, Open access, EconBiz, BioMedCentral, PLOS, Zenodo among others. I suggest that you look up for open access, free or otherwise easily accessible journals. You can easily do a search on your computer search engine and look up for journal databases and you will find at least 100 such databases that would have papers relevant for your research. These databases are most relevant for science and arts, humanities, social sciences and statistical, analytical, medicine, management and related papers. However, no matter which subject or research area you are interested in, you will find a journal database that will be relevant and completely in accordance with your research area and topic or interest. For instance, there are specialized journals such as PubMed which is a medical database and sciencedirect is a Science journal database. JSTOR is a social science database although papers of all subject areas are available.
Your sources for writing a research paper could be offline or online, but would generally help you at every stage of the research project. Your research requires primary sources and secondary sources, and secondary sources may also form the basis of the literature review. For the literature review, you must consult both online and offline sources and apart from the journal databases I already mentioned in this post, there are several others which you can look up. In general the top ten journal databases mentioned here would be sufficient for your research needs, but you do still have to look up other sources, including books and white papers and documents to complete your research. Athens login or any other related login as given by your school could help you to look for resources that are online.
Some of the major or common online and offline resources that you would need for your research are: Online journals, Web articles, News sources, Research papers, White Papers, Government documents, Press releases, Archives, Historical documents, Magazine articles, Books and Websites. There are several scholarly websites that could be useful for your research study and some of these are Google scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Internet Public Library, RefSeek, OpenDOAR, Archivenet and searches on these could return a range of results that would be very good resources or references for your research paper.
In this blog, I tried to focus on the offline and a range of online resources that could be helpful for your research paper. You will of course, find a range of sources on the internet, essay writing services and resources, online books, and journal articles that would be equally useful for your research.