Journals & eJournals

Finding Periodicals

Are you looking for a specific journal? See these instructions for finding a journal in our catalog and databases.

If you’re unsure where to begin, try this list of recommended journals.

Search the Library Catalog

How to Find Journals in the Catalog

eJournals …

Navigate to the library catalog by choosing Catalog ⇒ Go to the Catalog from the navigation bar.
In the catalog, select the Library Links dropdown menu and choose the option eJournals A–Z List.
Dropdown menu in the library catalog.
Select the tab labeled Journals.
Search or browse:
- Search the eJournal A–Z List to find out if Northwestern provides full-text coverage.
- Alternatively, select the Browse tab to see a complete list of journal titles.
Options available in the periodical search junction.

Print Journals …

Navigate to the library catalog by choosing Catalog ⇒ Go to the Catalog from the navigation bar.
Choose the Advanced Search option.
Advanced search.
Search by Title and specify Journal/Magazine under Format.
The advanced search screen.

In an EBSCO Database …

While in an EBSCO database, select the tab labeled Publications and browse the publication list.

You can subscribe to receive updates from a particular journal by using the button () to the left of the journal’s title.

Publication list displayed in a database. — Publications window in an EBSCO database.

Suggested Journals

The following journals and magazines may be useful to you.

This is not a comprehensive list, but a set of starting points. In a research database, search by Journal Title in conjunction with your other search terms.

Journal of Reading Education
The focus of the JRE is to promote excellence in literacy education through improvement in the training of reading teachers.
Journal of Research in Reading
Features reports of empirical studies in reading and related fields, and reviews of relevant literature.
Literacy Today
Provides a unique cross-sector perspective, from early years to continuing education, on current literacy issues across practice, policy & research. (Not peer reviewed.)
The Reading Teacher
Peer-reviewed, for those involved with literacy education up to age 12. Takes active stance on issues of education today.

Book Review Magazines

The following magazines feature reviews of books, including books for early readers.

Booklist
Provides a guide to current print and non-print materials worthy of consideration for purchase by small and medium-sized public libraries and school library media centers. (Not peer reviewed.)
Horn Book Magazine
Includes reviews of the best children’s books published, articles about children’s books, explorations of children’s books from every perspective and news of the children’s book world. (Not peer reviewed.)
Library Journal
Library & information science. (Not peer reviewed.)
School Library Journal
The most complete provider of news, information, and reviews for librarians and media specialists who serve children and young adults in school and public libraries. (Not peer reviewed.)

Additional Information

Open-Access Journals

Many scholarly sources are freely available online thanks to the open-access movement.

Open-access content comes in two forms, green and gold:

In green open access, an article is published behind a paywall but is also archived in a freely available database.

In gold open access, an article is freely available after publication, courtesy of the journal. The author may retain copyright.

Note: In libre open access, copyright restrictions are reduced or removed, usually with a Creative Commons license. Gold open access is often libre open access.

Article Databases

Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high-quality open-access, peer-reviewed journals.

The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open-access journals. Today, the independent database contains ca. 12,000 open-access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science, and humanities.
Because this is a directory of peer-reviewed journals freely accessible on the web, the titles cover a wide range of topics; careful searching may be necessary to discover relevant articles.
Elsevier Open Access
All articles in open-access journals which are published by Elsevier have undergone peer review and upon acceptance are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download.
Published articles:
- Are fully peer-reviewed
- Are immediately free to access and download from ScienceDirect
- Permitted re-use defined by the author’s choice of Creative Commons user licenses
- Published with CrossMark to maintain the publication record
JSTOR Open
Open-access journal articles and book chapters available from JSTOR. This open-access collection supplements our subscription-based JSTOR resources but is available to non-members of our university.

If you are on campus or logged into the library system, you can see all the open-access content—as well as subscription-only content—through the regular JSTOR database.
Ovid Journals Open Access
Ovid helps researchers, librarians, clinicians, and other healthcare professionals find important medical information so that they can make critical decisions to improve patient care, enhance ongoing research, and fuel new discoveries. This link will take you to Ovid’s open-access journals.
Project Euclid Open Access
Project Euclid’s mission is to provide powerful, low-cost online hosting and publishing services for theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics scholarship worldwide.

Project Euclid was developed and deployed by the Cornell University Library, with start-up funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is now jointly managed by the Cornell Library and Duke University Press. It was originally created to provide a platform for small, scholarly publishers of mathematics and statistics journals to move from print to electronic in a cost-effective way.
Through a combination of support by subscribing libraries and participating publishers, over 70% of the journal articles hosted on Project Euclid are openly available. As of 2018, Project Euclid hosts 1.8 million pages of open-access content.
Project MUSE Open Access
Project MUSE offers complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals and books from many of the world’s leading university presses and scholarly societies.

Project MUSE offers open-access (OA) books and journals from several distinguished university presses and scholarly societies. Through our open-access hosting programs, we are able to offer publishers a platform for their OA content, which ensures visibility, discoverability, and wide dissemination. These books and journals are freely available to libraries and users around the world.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free, full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

Since its inception in 2000, PMC has grown from comprising only two journals, PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Molecular Biology of the Cell, to an archive of articles from thousands of journals.
Today, PMC contains more than 6 million full-text records spanning several centuries of biomedical and life science research (late 1700s to present).

Theses & Dissertations

EBSCO Open Dissertations
EBSCO Open Dissertations now includes the content from American Doctoral Dissertations. It is a free database with records for more than 1.2 million electronic theses and dissertations from around the world.

This new collaboration extends the work started in 2014, when EBSCO and the H.W. Wilson Foundation created American Doctoral Dissertations, which contained indexing from the H.W. Wilson print publication, Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by American Universities, 1933–1955. In 2015, the H.W. Wilson Foundation agreed to support the expansion of the scope of the American Doctoral Dissertations database to include records for dissertations and theses from 1955 to the present.
Open Access Theses and Dissertations
OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open-access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world.

Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1100 colleges, universities, and research institutions.
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Open
PQDT Open provides the full text of open-access dissertations and theses free of charge.

You can quickly and easily locate dissertations and theses relevant to your discipline and view the complete text in PDF format.

Other Resources

BioMed Central
A pioneer of open access publishing, BMC has an evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC Series.
Cambridge Core Open Access
Open-access journals, articles, and books from Cambridge.
The Chronicles of Oklahoma
First issued in 1921 as the official journal of the OHS, The Chronicles of Oklahoma is mailed to members and subscribers quarterly. (Not peer reviewed.)
Oxford Open
Oxford University Press (OUP) is mission-driven to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research. We embrace both green and gold open access (OA) publishing to support this mission.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
A prestigious scientific journal, all of its content becomes freely available after six months.
Public Library of Science
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) publishes seven open-access, peer-reviewed journals on subjects of science and medicine.
The Royal Society
The Royal Society produces an array of prestigious scientific journals dating back as far as 350 years. Two of these journals are open-access, and others have selected open-access articles.