Below you will find online databases and periodical indexes that can help you search for full-text articles or allow you to locate citation information for articles on your topic. Please note: Many of our electronic resources have restricted access from off-campus and are only available to UMass-Amherst students, faculty or staff with an OIT account.

Quick List of Databases (Click here for descriptions):

• African American Biographical Database
• African American Newspapers: The 19th Century
• America: History and Life
  
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index (through ISI Web of Science)
  
• Book Review Digest
  
• Contemporary Literary Criticism
  
• Contemporary Women's Issues
  
• Dissertation Abstracts/Digital Dissertations
• Early English Books Online
• Essay and General Literature Index
• Ethnic NewsWatch
• Expanded Academic Index
• HAPI (Hispanic American Periodical Index)
• Humanities Index
  
• JSTOR
• Literature Resource Center
  
• MLA International Bibliography
• NetLibrary
• Oxford English Dictionary Online
  
• Project MUSE
• Reader's Guide Abstracts
• Reader's Guide Retrospective
• Short Story Index
  
• Women's Writers Project
• World Shakespeare Bibliography

List with Descriptions:

• African American Biographical Database - Biographies of thousands of African Americans assembled from
  biographical dictionaries and other sources.

• African American Newspapers: The 19th Century - African American Newspapers: The 19th Century - Full text of major African American newspapers published in the United States during the 19th century.
• America: History and Life - Includes indexing to more than 1700 journals, including many literature and folklore titles. 
  
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index (ISI Web of Science) - Citations and some abstracts covering more than a thousand journals in the literature of the arts and humanities. Unique features include cited references (lists of records cited by the documents found); citing articles (lists of records that cite the documents found), and related records (lists of records that share common references with the documents found). 
  
• Book Review Digest - Citations, abstracts, and book review excerpts from 1983 to the present. 
  
• Contemporary Literary Criticism - Critical excerpts from books, magazines, literature reviews, newspapers, and scholarly journals. 
  
• Contemporary Women's Issues - Social issues and criticism from mainstream periodicals, gray literature, and the alternative press. 
  
• Dissertation Abstracts/ Digital Dissertations - Citations and abstracts of doctoral and some masters theses, mostly completed in colleges and universities of the United States and Canada. Full text access to UMass dissertations.
• Early English Books Online - Reproductions of the 125,000 earliest books published in English, from the titles in the Short Title Catalogs of Pollard & Redgrave (Ref Z 2002 P77) and Wing (Ref Z 2002 U587).
• Ethnic NewsWatch - Full-text collection of newspapers, magazines and journals of the contemporary (20th and
  21st century) ethnic, minority and native press.
• Essay and General Literature Index - Index to essays that have appeared in 3,500 book collections and several periodicals, on current events, humanities and social sciences, searchable by subject, author, year, and more.
• Expanded Academic Index - Articles from more than 1,500 scholarly journals and general interest magazines in
  the humanities, social sciences and general sciences, many in full text.
• HAPI (Hispanic American Periodical Index) - Includes citations in English and Spanish on US Latino authors and culture.
• Humanities Index - Index to articles in about 500 English-language scholarly periodicals in archaeology, classical studies, cultural studies, art, performing arts, philosophy, history, music, linguistics, literature, and religion.
  
• JSTOR - Full-text collection of about 160 core scholarly journals in various academic disciplines, including American Literature, from their first issues to between two and five years to the present. 
• Literature Resource Center - A large collection of literature reference material, including Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism and the Dictionaries of Literary Biography from Gale; the Twayne's Author series; MLA Bibliography; and the Scribners Writers series.
  
• MLA International Bibliography (EBSCOhost version) | MLA Internatonal Bibliography (Infotrac version) - Citations and abstracts to journals, books, book chapters and dissertations in the fields of literature, literary theory, linguistics and folklore.
  
• NetLibrary - Collection of electronic books, including many classic American Literature titles. 
• Oxford English Dictionary Online - the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium.
  
• Project MUSE - Full-text online collection of over 100 journals in the humanities, social sciences and mathematics. Issues from 1996 to the present are included.
• Reader's Guide Abstracts - Citations and lengthy abstracts for articles from over 200 popular periodicals from the US and Canada. Date range: 1983-present.
• Reader's Guide Retrospective - Citations to articles in 600 popular US magazines. Date Range: 1963-1982
• Short Story Index - Index to almost 70,000 short stories published in collections or periodicals. Stories can
  be found by author, title, theme, locale, narrative technique, genre, or device (such as surprise endings,
  dialect stories, parodies, story within a story). Includes a few short stories in full text.
• Women's Writers Project - Full online texts of literature by women, with an emphasis on the 19th century. 
• World Shakespeare Bibliography - Annotated citations for both scholarly and popular books, articles, book
  reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, and electronic media relating to Shakespeare.

© 2001, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. This is an official publication of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. For comments or suggestions concerning this page, please contact: Isabel Espinal, iespinal@library.umass.edu

Created: June 2002
Last modified: July 28, 2004