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 Resources dropdown menu and choose the option eJournals A–Z List.
Figure 1
Dropdown Menu in the Library Catalog
When the search junction appears, select the tab labeled Journals.
Search or browse:
- Search the eJournals 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.
Figure 2
Options 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.
Figure 3
Advanced Search
Under Search Index, select Title. Then type the name of the journal you want to find in the Search Term bar.
Specify Journal/Magazine under Format and conduct your search.
Figure 4
The Advanced Search Screen

In an EBSCO Database …

While in an EBSCO database, select the tab labeled Publications to browse or search the publication list.

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

Publication list displayed in a database. — **Figure 5**
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.

Community Literacy Journal
Provides information about the field’s emerging methodologies and research agendas and includes work by literacy workers, practitioners and community literacy program staff.
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy is a peer-reviewed journal serving those interested in the teaching of reading to adolescents and adults. Each issue offers practical, classroom-tested ideas grounded in current research and theory.
Journal of Language & Literacy Education
Features articles on issues related to the field of language & literacy education.
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 & Practice for Adult Literacy, Secondary & Basic Education
A journal of literacy education research.
Journal of Research in Reading
Features reports of empirical studies in reading and related fields, and reviews of relevant literature.
Literacy
A journal of literacy and literacy education.
Literacy Practice & Research
A journal of literacy education.

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
- Why search here? This open-access database contains a wide array of peer-reviewed journals on almost every subject.
- What’s included? The DOAJ contains over 20,000 full-text, open-access journals.
DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open-access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.
Open—DOAJ is a vital part of the global open-access infrastructure.
Global—DOAJ is a global community, with team members, ambassadors and volunteers based in 45 countries around the world, speaking 36 languages.
Trusted—Globally, DOAJ’s criteria have become a gold standard for open-access publishing.
Our Mission
DOAJ’s mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage, and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language.
DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its primary services and metadata as free for everyone.
Vendor-provided description
ScienceDirect Open Access
- Why search here? This collection of open-access journals covers almost every subject.
- What’s included? Included are over 1,300 peer-reviewed journals and books published by Elsevier.
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
Vendor-provided description
Project Euclid Open Access
- Why search here? Project Euclid hosts full-text, peer-reviewed journals dedicated to mathematics and statistics.
- What’s included? The open-access version of Project Euclid hosts over forty full-text journals.
Project Euclid was developed and deployed by Cornell University Library, with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is now managed by 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 80% of the journal articles hosted on Project Euclid are openly available.
Our Mission
Project Euclid’s mission is to provide powerful, low-cost online hosting and publishing services for theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics scholarship worldwide. As a nonprofit, community-driven international partnership of academic libraries, independent and society scholarly publishers, and scholars, Project Euclid actively supports broad, sustainable access to this scholarship.
Project Euclid description
Project MUSE Open Access
- Why search here? Project MUSE maintains an open-access online repository for full-text eBooks and journals in the humanities.
- What’s included? The open-access resources on Project MUSE are eclectic, covering all branches of the humanities.
Project MUSE offers open-access (OA) books, journals, and, digital humanities works from several distinguished university presses, scholarly societies, and independent not-for-profit academic publishers. 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 materials are freely available to libraries and users around the world.
Project MUSE description
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).
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). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC is part of the NLM collection, which also includes NLM’s extensive print and licensed electronic journal holdings and supports contemporary biomedical and health care research and practice as well as future scholarship.
Available to the public online since 2000, PMC was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at NLM.
About the Content
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. In addition, PMC also contains author manuscripts deposited through the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS), and preprints collected through the NIH Preprint Pilot.
The PMC archive contains more than 8 million full-text article records spanning several centuries of biomedical and life science research (late 1700s to present). This content includes articles that have been formally published in a scholarly journal, author manuscripts that have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in a journal, and preprint versions of articles that have been made public prior to peer review.
Content is deposited in the PMC archive through collaborations with publishers, societies, research funders, and international organizations. Our Collections page provides an overview of the collections that result from these content collaborations.
National Library of Medicine description

Theses & Dissertations

EBSCO Open Dissertations
- Why search here? This open-access database can direct you to the full text of theses and doctoral dissertations on almost any subject.
- What’s included? This collection contains over one and a half million dissertations from 320 universities worldwide.
With EBSCO Open Dissertations, institutions and students are offered an innovative approach to driving additional traffic to ETDs in institutional repositories. Our goal is to help make their students’ theses and dissertations as widely visible and cited as possible.
This approach 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.
Vendor-provided description
Open Access Theses and Dissertations
- Why search here? This database links to full-text graduate theses and doctoral dissertations on every academic subject.
- What’s included? The database includes over seven million theses and dissertations from over 1,100 institutions.
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 1,100 colleges, universities, and research institutions.
Vendor-provided description

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.