Public Journals Online   Tags: articles, free, internet, journals  

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The emphasis here is on publicly accessible journals, magazines, and newspapers. Includes library, news, medical and science journals as well as Google Scholar, Google Magazines and Google News Archives. All journals listed include full text articles, varying from one or two sample articles to all the articles contained in the print version.

COM students, faculty and staff can access full text The Chronicle of Higher Education, Literature Online journals and EBSCO and Gale journals.

To access COM Library full text journals see the Databases by Subject LibGuide and the COM Library Online Journals LibGuide.

When researching for college, keep in mind that scholarly journals and magazines are quite different. Scholarly journals have content that has been written by scholars or experts in their field. The most authoritative scholarly journals are peer reviewed. See the chart below for a comparison of scholarly journals to popular magazines.

Was the material reviewed, edited or fact checked for publication?
Reviewed or edited articles are more closely scrutinized for accuracy and value. Professional or scholarly journals have more reviewed and edited articles than popular magazines (see the chart below).

Where to find review/editing for articles or books
Check the front of the periodical or book for information on the editing, review and selection process for that periodical. Some databases such as EBSCO Academic Search Complete let you limit your search to scholarly or peer reviewed journals.

Where to find review/editing for web sites
Web sites may have this information at the beginning or end of a page or on the home page of the site, but are much less likely to have been reviewed. 

The chart below lists criteria that can be used to tell whether you have an article from a scholarly journal or from a popular magazine. Most of the criteria listed for scholarly journal articles can also be applied to books and Internet resources to help determine their value. The more criteria your resource has listed under the Scholarly Journals column, the more likely it will be a good resource.