Database Overview

Learn about the research databases available at the library.

The A–Z Database List contains our entire suite of research databases, which house peer-reviewed journals, newspapers, magazines, and books.

If you can’t find what you need, please contact the research librarian at dgdavidson@nwosu.edu or 580-327-8572.

A–Z Database List

This dropdown menu contains a complete, alphabetical list of the available databases.

To see a complete description of each database, use this link:

Research Databases
Follow this link to see the complete list of available databases.

Additional Search Tools

Quick Links

Current Events Databases
See a list of research databases containing sources such as newspapers and news blogs.
Multidisciplinary Databases
These databases contain a wide range of subject matter and may be useful for almost any research project.
Search Journals
Looking for a specific journal, magazine, or newspaper title? Search here to find out if NWOSU provides full-text coverage.

Database Providers

These links will take you to the online platforms of our major database providers, from which you can get direct access to their resources.

All EBSCOhost Databases
- Why search here? The EBSCOhost platform allows you to select multiple databases and search them simultaneously. This is useful for multidisciplinary research or if you’re uncertain which database is most suitable.
- What’s included? Most of the EBSCO products to which we subscribe can be searched through this portal.
EBSCOhost is an intuitive online research platform used by thousands of institutions and millions of users worldwide. With quality databases and search features, EBSCOhost helps researchers of all kinds find the information they need fast.
Vendor-provided description
Access to EBSCOhost is a project of the Oklahoma Library Technology Network and is funded with state and federal funds through the Oklahoma Department of Libraries. This link will take you to a suite of EBSCO databases available at NWOSU.
JSTOR
- Why search here? JSTOR is a large, full-text database covering a wide range of academic subjects, including biology, history, law, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, political science, psychology, social science, and social work.
- What’s included? JSTOR contains the full text of thousands of journals, and its collections are especially strong for older or historic journals.
JSTOR offers open-access content available to everyone. We also subscribe to three exclusive JSTOR collections:
Arts & Sciences Ⅰ
JSTOR’s first collection includes core journals in economics, history, political science, and sociology, as well as in other key fields in the humanities and social sciences.
Arts & Sciences Ⅻ
This collection complements JSTOR coverage in the social sciences, focusing on disciplines with high usage and broad appeal across all levels of higher education. Journals in education, law, and political science anchor the collection, with other titles in criminology and criminal justice, history, psychology, social work, and sociology. Additional journals cover African studies, Asian studies, and Middle East studies.
Life Sciences
This collection provides extensive coverage in the field sciences, with great depth in botany, ecology, and ornithology, along with important titles in general science, medicine, nursing, epidemiology, and public health.
Vendor-provided descriptions
Mometrix eLibrary
- Why search here? Mometrix eLibrary is a collection of up-to-date test preparation materials.
- What’s included? This database contains study materials for the following exams:
  - ACT
  - ASWB
  - CNA
  - GMAT
  - GRE
  - LSAT
  - MAT
  - MCAT
  - NCLEX
  - OAT
  - OGET
  - OPTE
  - OSAT
  - PCAT
Mometrix eLibrary is a cloud-based web application that provides access to our … database of test preparation materials.
The streamlined interface is intuitive, and allows users to quickly find relevant materials for their exam.
Study materials are available anywhere, anytime with unlimited simultaneous access.
Vendor-provided description

Open-Access Databases

These scholarly databases are freely available on the internet.

Directory of Open Access Books
- Why search here? The Directory of Open Access Books contains freely available, peer-reviewed academic eBooks on a variety of subjects.
- What’s included? The Directory’s content is eclectic and covers a wide range of academic subjects.
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of open-access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their open-access books to DOAB. DOAB is an open infrastructure committed to open science. It runs on the open-source DSpace 6 platform. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility, and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer-reviewed books in open access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in open access and meet academic standards.
Vendor-provided description
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
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
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
- Why search here? This full-text database contains peer-reviewed journals dedicated to medicine, biology, and life science.
- What’s included? The database contains over nine million peer-reviewed articles and preprints. Articles date from the late 1700s to the present.
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
Retraction Watch
- Why search here? Retraction Watch is a database of peer-reviewed articles that have been retracted because of plagiarism, fraud, or error. It also indexes articles about which “expressions of concern” have been made—that is, concerns that may eventually lead to retractions. This database can assist students in avoiding poor research.
- What’s included? The database contains thousands of entries. Each entry includes title, place of publication, author, reason for retraction, and other relevant information.
The Retraction Watch blog chronicles news stories about prominent retractions.

Reference Databases

These research databases contain full-text reference works.

Their content includes encyclopedias and specialized dictionaries but may also include journal articles and other sources.

General Reference

Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia
- Why search here? This encyclopedia features brief topical overviews useful for beginning almost any research project.
- What’s included? This is a general encyclopedia containing over 25,000 full-text entries.
For students and adults alike, the Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia database indexes over 25,000 records, covering an array of topics. Full text for each record may be easily accessed by double-clicking on the topic from the display. The database contains various images and offers brief biographies as well as information in a variety of subject areas. This database is updated annually.
Vendor-provided description
Oxford English Dictionary Online
- Why search here? The Oxford English Dictionary is the most authoritative and exhaustive dictionary of the English language, past and present. With the OED, a student can track how the meaning of a word has changed over time. This is especially valuable for students of English.
- What’s included? The OED includes not only current definitions but historical definitions and usages accompanied by examples from a wide range of literature.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and usage of 500,000 words and phrases past and present, from across the English-speaking world.
As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from dictionaries of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You’ll still find present-day meanings in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, sometimes from as far back as the 11th century, and of the language—traced through 3.5 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts, song lyrics, and social media posts.
The OED started life more than 150 years ago. Today, the dictionary is in the process of its first full revision. Updates revise and extend the OED at regular intervals, each time subtly adjusting our image of the English language.
Vendor-provided description

Legal & Business Information

Legal Information Source
- Why search here? Legal Information Source contains legal forms and legal information aimed at the layman rather than the specialist. Topics include family law, property law, and business law, among others.
- What’s included? The collection includes legal reference books from Nolo and thousands of legal forms.
Providing exclusive online full text for many of the top consumer legal reference books, Legal Information Reference Center contains more than 225 full-text publications and thousands of legal forms, with more content being added on a regular basis. A majority of the full-text legal reference books are provided through Nolo, the nation’s oldest and most respected provider of legal information for consumers and small businesses. This database will offer the everyday user the necessary tools and detailed ‘how-to’ instructions to independently address a wide range of legal issues, including business law, financial planning, family law, property & real estate, and rights & disputes.
Vendor-provided description
Small Business Source
- Why search here? Small Business Source contains multiple resources on starting or managing a business. This may be useful for Business majors.
- What’s included? Contents include almost 400 full-text magazines and journals and 400 full-text reference books, as well as market and industry research reports. Additional resources include instructional videos and state-specific demographic information.
The Small Business Reference Center provides up-to-date information on relevant topics from starting a company, operations management and sales, to growing or rescuing a business. The database contains nearly 400 full-text periodicals and over 450 full-text reference books. The user-friendly interface guides through small business and entrepreneurial subject areas, common business types, a help and advice section, and provides information on how to create business plans that lead to successful funding. Business videos provide critical information for business owners: Interviews, ‘lessons learned’ features, lectures, and ‘how to’ videos help foster success in all aspects of managing a business. A collection of state-specific resources supports the researcher with demographic data and other local information. The Small Business Reference Center is updated daily.
Vendor-provided description

English & Literature

Gale Literature Resource Center
- Why search here? This is the most important database for the English program, and it is also useful for other fields in the humanities.
- What’s included? This database contains full-text author biographies, literary analyses, and reviews for a wide range of literature, conveniently sorted by resource type.
Gale Literature Resource Center is Gale’s most current, comprehensive, and reliable online literature resource, offering the broadest and most representative range of authors and their works, including a deep collection of full-text critical and literary analysis for literary studies. The resource provides researchers with unbounding literary resources to support their literary responses, literary analysis, and thesis statements through a diversity of scholars and critics that ensure all views and interpretations are represented.
Researchers can find up-to-date analysis, biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world. Gale Literature Resource Center brings together materials that support interdisciplinary approaches, information literacy, and the development of critical thinking skills. Researchers with a literature, history, arts, gender studies, or cultural studies focus can use this resource to analyze authors and works throughout time.
Vendor-provided description
Poetry & Short Story Reference Source
- Why search here? This database features full-text poems, short stories, and dramatic works, as well as biographies, critical essays, and eBooks.
- What’s included? The database contains 400,000 poems, over 50,000 short stories, over 4,000 dramatic works, and over 1,100 eBooks.
Poetry & Short Story Reference Center™ is the most comprehensive collection of full-text poetry, short stories, and supplemental content available, offering users a historically rich collection of hundreds of thousands of poems, as well as biographies and authoritative essays on such topics as poetic forms, movements, and techniques. This multifaceted database incorporates information from major respected reference works, books, and literary journals, as well as proprietary content from EBSCO Publishing, and includes hundreds of thousands of full-text poems and tens of thousands of short stories ranging in period from antiquity to the present. The most studied poems are supplemented with indexing covering subject, poetic forms, poetic themes, techniques, and literary periods, schools, and movements.
Vendor-provided description

Health & Psychology

Consumer Health Reference eBook Collection
- Why search here? This collection of reference texts supplements Consumer Health Complete.
- What’s included? The collection includes almost 370 full-text, health-related reference works aimed at the general reader.
This ebook reference collection offers a rich selection of eBook titles covering a broad range of general health topics including cancer and diabetes; weight management and exercise; allergies; senior care; social–emotional health; developmental disorders; and natural health.
Vendor-provided description
Mental Measurements Yearbook with Tests in Print
- Why search here? The Mental Measurements Yearbook contains descriptions and reviews of commercially available psychometric tests used in education, business, and psychology. Although potentially useful to all students whose field of research involves mental tests, this database is particularly important for graduate students planning their own research projects.
- What’s included? The Mental Measurements Yearbook annually produces extensive descriptions of new testing instruments with reviews by subject experts. Tests in Print maintains a bibliography of all testing instruments currently available in English.
Produced by the Buros Center for Testing at the University of Nebraska, the Mental Measurements Yearbook (MMY) provides users with a comprehensive guide to thousands of contemporary testing instruments. Designed for an audience ranging from novice test consumers to experienced professionals, the MMY series contains information essential for a complete evaluation of test products within such diverse areas as psychology, education, business, and leadership. All MMY entries contain descriptive information (e.g., test purpose, publisher, pricing) and edited review(s) written by leading content-area experts. To be included in the MMY, a test must be commercially available, be published in the English language, and be new or revised since it last appeared in the series. First published by Oscar K. Buros, the MMY series allows users to make knowledgeable judgments and informed selection decisions about the increasingly complex world of testing.
Also produced by the Buros Center for Testing at the University of Nebraska, Tests in Print (TIP) serves as a comprehensive bibliography to all known commercially available tests that are currently in print in the English language. TIP provides vital information to users including test purpose, test publisher, in-print status, price, test acronym, intended test population, administration times, publication date(s), and test author(s).
Subscribers are entitled access to the content included in all volumes of the Mental Measurements Yearbook series from Volume 1 to current.
Vendor-provided description

Home & Craft

Hobbies & Crafts Source
- Why search here? Hobbies & Crafts Source contains an array of popular publications on crafts, hobbies, and recreation.
- What’s included? The database contains over 740 magazines and books as well as over 700 instructional videos.
Hobbies & Crafts Reference Center provides comprehensive full-text content for many of the most popular hobbies, crafts, and recreation activities today. Including full text for more than 740 magazines and books, as well as access to more than 720 videos and over 140 hobby reports, this database offers detailed ‘how-to’ instructions and creative ideas to meet the interests of virtually every hobby enthusiast. Subject areas include arts & crafts; collecting; games & electronics; model building; home & leisure; needlework; outdoors & nature; and scrapbooking & papercraft. The database also features extensive information on over 140 topics. Hobbies & Crafts Reference Center provides full text from the leading hobby and craft magazines, including Bead & Button, Birder’s World, Creative Knitting, FineScale Modeler, PaperWorks, Scrapbooking, Quilter’s World, and many more.
Vendor-provided description
Home Improvement Source
- Why search here? Home Improvement Source contains magazines, reference materials, and instructions on all aspects of do-it-yourself home improvement and repair.
- What’s included? The database contains thousands of repair instructions and a wide range of home-improvement magazines and reference books.
Home Improvement Reference Center is a full-text database designed for use in public and school libraries. Content contained in the database will focus on home improvement and home repair. The main navigation will direct researchers to high-quality repair information. Thousands of repairs will be available in the areas of outdoor projects, electrical projects, remodeling projects, plumbing projects, wood projects, decorating projects, and maintenance. In addition to the repair information, other magazines and reference books focusing on home improvement will be included in the database. The intent of this new product is to provide full-text articles that show instructions, tips, and suggestions for a variety of home improvement projects.
Vendor-provided description

Schools & Public Libraries

MAS Complete
- Why search here? This database contains popular magazines and books on a wide range of nonfiction subjects. Although intended for high schools, it may be useful for subjects such as sports science, fine arts, social science, social work, and others.
- What’s included? Contents include over 540 full-text magazines, 440 reference books, thousands of biographies and primary-source documents, and an image collection.
Designed specifically for high school libraries, this database contains full text for more than 540 popular high school magazines. MAS Complete also provides more than 440 full-text reference books, 85,670 biographies, 105,786 primary-source documents, and an Image Collection of over 502,000 photos, maps & flags, color PDFs, and expanded full-text backfiles (back to 1975) for key magazines.
Vendor-provided description
MAS Reference eBook Collection
- Why search here? This reference book collection supplements MAS Complete. Although intended for high school students, its contents may be useful in undergraduate classes.
- What’s included? Over 370 reference books on a wide variety of subjects are included.
This ebook reference collection offers a rich selection of eBook titles covering a broad range of general reference subjects for high school students. Topics include biography, history, careers, language arts, literature, government, health, math, science, current events, and social-emotional health.
Vendor-provided description
MasterFILE Complete
- Why search here? This collection contains a wide selection of popular magazines, reference books, and primary-source documents on many subjects. It is especially useful for researching business and current events.
- What’s included? The collection includes over 2,300 magazines, 1,100 eBooks, 55,000 primary-source documents, and 75,000 Associated Press videos, as well as an image collection.
The MasterFILE Complete is designed specifically for public libraries. This multidisciplinary database provides full text for more than 2,000 general reference publications, with full-text information dating as far back as 1922. Covering virtually every subject area of general interest, MasterFILE Complete also contains full text for more than 1,000 reference books and over 164,400 primary-source documents, as well as an Image Collection of over 502,000 photos, maps, & flags. This database is updated daily via EBSCOhost.
Vendor-provided description
MasterFILE Complete Reference eBook Subscription
- Why search here? This reference collection supplements MasterFILE Complete. Although intended for public libraries, its contents may be useful in undergraduate classes.
- What’s included? Almost 780 reference books on a wide variety of subjects are included.
This ebook reference collection offers a rich selection of eBook titles covering a broad range of general reference subjects. Topics include biography, history, careers, cooking, literature, genealogy, health, parenting, personal finance, politics, architecture, science, current events, social-emotional health, sports, and travel.
Vendor-provided description
Middle Search Reference eBook Collection
- Why search here? This reference book collection supplements Middle Search Plus. Although intended for middle schools, its contents may be useful in undergraduate classes.
- What’s included? Over 300 reference books on a wide variety of subjects are included.
This ebook reference collection offers a rich selection of eBook titles covering a broad range of general reference subjects for middle school students. Topics include social studies, math, history, language arts, technology, geography, culture, and science.
Vendor-provided description
Primary Search Reference eBook Collection
- Why search here? This reference book collection supplements Primary Search. Although intended for elementary school students, its contents may be useful to the Division of Education or anyone looking for a cursory overview of a topic.
- What’s included? A large collection of children’s reference books on a wide variety of subjects is included.
This eBook reference collection offers a rich selection of eBook titles covering a broad range of general reference subjects for primary school students. Topics include social studies, history, language arts, geography, culture, math, and science.
Vendor-provided description

Featured Databases

Downloading eBooks?

eBook Help Page
Tips on downloading eBooks from our library catalog, EBSCOhost, Gale eBooks, and more.

Useful eBooks

The Invisible Web by Chris Sherman; Gary Price
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9781573879781
Publication Date: January 1, 2001
Only 16 percent of net-based information can be located using a general search engine. The other 84 percent is what is referred to as the invisible web, made up of information stored in databases. Unlike pages on the visible web, information in databases is generally inaccessible to the software spiders and crawlers that compile search-engine indexes. … The tips provided in this resource will ensure that those databases are exposed and Net-based research will be conducted in the most thorough and effective manner.

Alternate EBSCO Interfaces

EBSCOhost offers a variety of interfaces appropriate to different subjects.

Below are all of the interfaces, some with their own unique databases, available to Oklahoma libraries courtesy of the Oklahoma Digital Prairie Project.