Open Access Journals & Databases

Google Scholar searches across many scholarly disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, and universities with non scholarly results filtered out. Some of these scholarly results include free full text and many more are available for free to COM students, faculty and staff.

You can create a search alert with Google Scholar to get automatic updates on your research topic. Here's how:

1. Go to Google Scholar.
2. Search for your topic.
3. Click the envelope icon in the sidebar of the search results page.
4. Enter your email address, and click "Create alert".
5. Google will periodically email you newly published papers that match your search criteria.

You can really save some time by using the Advanced Search options if you are searching for specific publications, authors, legal or want to restrict the date.

To access the options, click on the arrow (pull down menu) of the search box. 

You'll get options to restrict results to specific authors, publications, dates and more. 

Most of the articles in Google Scholar come with an abstract, but some are also be available with free full text for everyone. If you don't have access to full text through your local library, here are some things to try to get the full text:

1.  Look for [DOC], [PDF] or [HTML] on the result list. When you see one of these options, just click on it to get the full text.
2. If you don't see [DOC], [PDF] or [HTML] on the result list, look for All versions--there may be a free full text version there.
3. If you still have not found the full text, look for Related articles under your article to see if articles on the same topic are available full text.