Articles for Legal and Non-Legal Research

This is a quick guide to scholarly article databases and indexes.

Overview

 A full-text database contains the entire texts of articles, and can include bibliographic information. The full-text articles databases in Lexis, Westlaw, and HeinOnline are the most popular for full-text searching of law articles.  Some caveats when using full-text databases:

  • Searching for a particular key word or phrase in full text databases will retrieve articles that contain the key word(s) or phrase anywhere in the articles that are retrieved. The search results are likely to include lots of hits that are not particularly relevant to your topic.
  • Full-text databases tend to have more limited date coverage. The collections in Lexis and Westlaw generally begin in the 1990s, although coverage of some titles go back to the late 1970s.
  • Lexis and Westlaw full-text databases contain only a percentage of the journal titles that are collected in the indexing databases, such as LegalTrac. Relying solely on these databases will limit the sources you find.

Westlaw and Lexis require individual accounts to access.  If you do not have access to any of these, please contact the Reference Desk, through email or chat, to receive your registration information. When off-campus HeinOnline will require you to log in using your NetID login information.

Listed below are full-text databases that provide access to articles, and other materials, in a wide array of subject areas.

To find out if we have access to a particular database, use the Databases search box, or select the "Databases" tab above the search box on the library's website, and search for the database name.

For databases that collect articles, and other materials, within specific topic areas, see the contents list to the left. You also have access to the databases at Lauinger Library.  To find a database for a specific topic area use Lauinger Library's Research Guides

Major Full-Text Databases: Non-Legal, Multi-Disciplinary Databases