Use article databases to find journals articles (as well as dissertations, book chapters, and other resources) on a specific topic. In some cases, you will be able to link directly from the article database to the full text of the article. In other cases, you will need to search the title of the journal (not the author or title of the article) in the Library Catalog, to find out where it is located.

By "article databases" we mean both bibliographic databases (databases that contain records or citations to journal articles) and online full-text journal collections. Many bibliographic databases include some full text.

There are many article databases for finding periodical articles.  These databases are often called article indexes, but they are essentially searchable bibliographies of journal articles organized by subject.

Because the Library does not subscribe to every journal, and because not all journals are digitized, and because not all digitized journals are available in a single collection, the article indexes provide the only efficient means of identifying relevant articles from across the widest possible range of periodical publications.

The main article index for philosophy is Philosophers Index:

Two other sources we recommend are PhilPapers and the Oxford Bibliography of Philosophy:

If you find a citation for an article in a journal to which we do not have a subscription, you can quickly get a copy of the article (often within 24 hours) by requesting it through interlibrary loan:

Although article databases are usually the best place to start a general search for journal articles, full text collections are of course increasingly important. Remember, however, that for the broadest search, you should use an article index, because article indexes include records for articles in journals to which we do not subscribe, but that you can quickly obtain through interlibrary loan. Full text collections only include journals to which we subscribe.