Search Engines and Repositories
for Open Access Scholarly Papers and Articles
These sources provide access to
cost-free and open source scholarly materials in
international studies topics that are often not
readily available through the major search engines
These two sites contain many relevant
papers, and offer free membership: Academia ResearchGate
• The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine is "one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources,... operated by Bielefeld University Library [in Germany]," providing scores of millions of documents from more than 6,000 sources, many in international studies topics. About 75 percent of the documents are available free in full-text.
• CORE
(COnnecting REpositories)-- "Aims to facilitate
free access to scholarly publications distributed across
many systems... gives you access to millions of
scholarly articles aggregated from many Open Access
repositories." Many international studies articles are
available, in full-text. Use the "refine
your search" option for best results.
• DART-Europe--
"Partnership of research libraries and library
consortia who are working together to improve global
access to European research theses." Through this
interface, a "single European portal for the
discovery of electronic theses and dissertations,"
you can access in full-text over 1.1 million open
access research theses from over 570 universities in
29 European countries.
• Directory of Open Access Journals-- Provides free access to millions of articles in over 17,000 peer-reviewed scholarly journals in 80 languages and from 130 countries. Use the advanced search option.
• Google
Scholar "enables you to search specifically for
scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers,
theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports
from all broad areas of research... to find articles from
a wide variety of academic publishers, professional
societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well
as scholarly articles available across the web." Many
international affairs sources are included. Particularly
good for finding Open Access, free, and recent items. For search technique tips, see the Google
Scholar Blog and the Research Buzz article "Google Scholar and the Full-Word
Wildcard."
• IDEAS--
"The largest bibliographic
database dedicated to Economics and available freely on
the Internet," with millions of research items, most
available for free download through a thorough search
system. "Includes bibliographic metadata from over
2,000 participating archives, including all the major
publishers and research outlets."
•
The International
and Area Studies Commons of the Social
and Behavioral Sciences Commons posts thousands of
open-source academic papers in international and area
studies topics. These are part of the much larger Digital
Commons Network that "brings together free, full-text
scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and
colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and
their supporting institutions, the Network includes a
growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book
chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference
proceedings, and other original scholarly work."
• Internet Archive Scholar
"includes over 25 million research articles and other
scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The
collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth
century journals through the latest Open Access conference
proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide
Web." Provides a full-text search capacity and a User Guide. For more tips, see
the blog entry "Search Scholarly
Materials Preserved in the Internet Archive."
• London School of Economics Research Online-- "Aims to be a complete database of research produced by LSE Staff... made as useful as possible by the inclusion of abstracts and electronic links to journal articles or publishers' websites." Large repository for high-quality scholarly production in politics and economics, in many formats, much of it available free in full-text or video form.
• Networked
Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations--
"International organization dedicated to promoting the
adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation
of electronic theses and dissertations." Provides a worldwide directory to find
online electronic theses and dissertations.
• OAIster--
Accessed here through WorldCat, "a union catalog of
millions of records representing Open Access resources
that was 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," including many free full-text items
in international studies topics. Use the advanced
search option for best results.
• Open Access Theses and
Dissertations-- "Aims to
be the best possible resource for finding Open Access
graduate theses and dissertations published around the
world... currently indexes [over 5 million]
theses and dissertations," including many on
international topics.
• OpenDOAR-
From JISC, UK, "an authoritative directory of academic
Open Access repositories... As well as providing a simple
repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories
or search repository contents."
• Political Research Online--
"Collaborative project led by the American Political
Science Association and a consortium of political science
and related associations... a
pre-print server that serves as the common resource for
all emerging scholarship in political science," such as
conference papers, early scholarly drafts, and papers from
research institutes. Requires free registration.
• The Social
Science Open Access Repository posts a "steadily
growing collection of full-text social-science documents
which you can access freely," in many languages, obtained
both by professional self-postings and "through
co-operation with institutes, scientific
associations, publishers and editors." Many of the
documents are in international studies topics.
• The Social Science Research
Network "is devoted to the rapid worldwide
dissemination of social science research and is composed
of a number of specialized research networks in each of
the social sciences." Many thousands of academic and
research institute papers are available for free download,
including in international studies topics.
• Unpaywall-- A widely professionally-used system that harvests and retrieves millions of items of scholarly "Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and make[s] it easy to find, track, and use." You can download a browser extension to access the system most easily. Users guides to Unpaywall are posted.
• WorldWideScience.org
"is a global science gateway comprised of national and
international scientific databases and portals [which]
provides real-time searching and translation of
globally-dispersed multilingual scientific literature."
Powerful search facility provides bibliographic citations
and availability information for a huge number of
scholarly science and social science publications in many
languages. Some are available in cost-free, full-text form.
For most effective results, use the Advanced Search
option and consult the "Help" section.
