Research Journals and Articles - Where to find information

Very few high schools have subscriptions or access to top science journals, and these can be too expensive for a typical high school budget. If you do not have any contacts with university sources or databases, it can be difficult to get primary, peer-reviewed literature for science research projects.

Here are some free online resources to help you gather information from reliable sources:
Literature Resources

Arxiv - a premier e-Print site for physics, computer science, mathematics, and some other fields. Many professional scientists post their research findings here prior to publication in the top peer-reviewed journals. Run through Cornell University.

ERIC - searches through education resources, including STEM areas.

Google Scholar - searches through journals; often one cannot get the full article without a journal subscription, but abstracts are available. Sometimes one can email the specific article information to a college contact, who can send the PDF of the article. Highly recommended.

Nature - one of the premier science journals; likely won't access full articles, but can find abstracts and publication information.

Physics Today - Mid-level articles on all types of physics related research.

Public Library of Science (PLOS) - find free journals and articles for biological research.

PubMed - for biological and life science research.

PubMed Central (PMC) - now includes all peer-reviewed articles published by any group that has any NASA funding. Browse all NASA articles in PMC. Search all PMC articles.

ScienceDirect - search engine for information in most science areas.

Science News - Good preliminary information on all types of research in all fields of study. Written at high school level.

Science Search - Can find articles published in the journal Science, one of the premier research journals.

Scientific American - find articles on just about any field of study. Often there are links to primary research articles.

Scientific Research - an Academic Publisher of open access journal articles, in all major STEM fields of study. Highly recommended.

Wikipedia - some teachers do not like or trust Wikipedia. However, for technical subjects this is often a good first step. Use the articles to find the citations list for some primary sources.

Some additional online research resources: 

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Student Science Research Publications Journals and Magazines:
Students can submit their research papers to the following journals for publication, and many of these types of articles can help inspire new project ideas and information on an enormous range of topics:

• Sigma Xi, Chronicle of the New Researcher
• The Columbia Junior Science Journal
• Journal of Emerging Investigators (all papers accepted, grad student review)
• National High School Research Journal of Science (student-reviewed)

Journal of Experimental Secondary Science

• *Note that many CABS projects can be used by other teachers as lab demos, students labs, or inquiry projects for their students. You might consider searching through teacher professional journals, such as The Physics Teacher or The Science Teacher.

Video Resources

Khan Academy - video lessons if you are looking to learn about specific science topics.

NOVA Official website

Nova ScienceNow

TED Talks

YouTube Homepage



Online Courses

Alison - free science courses on selected topics

Codecademy - learn a variety of programming languages, including Python

Coursera - free online college courses, from numerous major research universities

EdX - free online college courses, from numerous major research universities

HarvardX - free online courses and MOOCs from Harvard

MIT OpenCourseWare - free online MIT courses.