Peer Reviewed Publications on the World Wide Web

Along with SLU Libraries collections students can use several searches and directories to identify and even access peer reviewed articles published on the World Wide Web. Now, be forewarned, scholarship as manifest on the Internet can be a thing apart from that on the shelves upstairs or down in ODY. One needs to keep in mind what constitutes a scholarly article as one navigates and assesses the myriad of publications—and half publications—that make up the Internet.  Given that, there is scholarly material available “out there” that can drive any project.  The following are searches or directories that can be of use in tracking this material down. 

Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com

Google Scholar is an extremely effective search for scholarship from across the academic disciplines.  Like most things in this life, Google Scholar has its advantages and disadvantages.  What Google Scholar does is search the open web for scholarly material, and it also indexes a number of databases from commercial publishers like JSTOR with whom Google has worked out a deal.  There is a very useful utility that links to similar web sites, and an even more useful utility that provides a list of materials which have cited a given record in a results list.   What one has to watch with Google scholar is that, in contrast with “ordinary Google,” it does not always provide full text. Many of the results in a Google Scholar search are to citations. Also, Google has never been very clear about what they consider scholarship. One has to read and assess critically when reviewing results from a Google Scholar search, still, this is a very helpful manifestation of Google.

Directory of Open Access Journals
http://www.doaj.org/

Sponsored by the Lund University Libraries (Lund Sweden), this is a list of peer reviewed journals published without subscription restrictions on the World Wide Web. The range of journals speaks to all the academic disciplines, and they are, as a rule, published by academic departments, organizations, libraries, and the like. The quality and upkeep of the journals varies greatly: some are active and ongoing projects, while others have clearly fallen into disrepair.

Duke University NGO Research Guide
http://library.duke.edu/research/subject/guides/ngo_guide/

This guide provides an overview of  Non-Governmental Organizations as information sources. They are major sponsors of research and statistical publications for topics that include world development, world affairs, economics, demographics, environmental policy, and social justice.  These are players like the EU and UN, and have long established reputations for publishing authoritative research.

HighWire Press Journals
http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl

An ongoing Stanford University project to create an open access model for publishing research in the sciences.  Many branches of the sciences are represented in the HighWire journals.  A substantive number of the journals are completely represented, some have access to a greater or lesser extent of the content (just what is available is clearly indicated).  Health and medical research are particularly well represented.

Infomine
http://infomine.ucr.edu/

Infomine was established in 1994 to be  ” a virtual library of Internet resources relevant to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level.” It was created and is maintained by librarians from a number of universities across the United States. Its scope goes beyond peer reviewed journals: it indexes all sorts of things including fairly informal publications, but it is still a major online, edited, academic resource.

Sciences.gov
http://www.science.gov/

This is a meta-search of U.S. Government databases that are available on the open web.  These databases index a considerable body of research in education, health, and the sciences. The United States is a major sponsor of research in all these areas, and these databases are a major access point for tax-funded research.  Some major government databases like ERIC, AGRICOLA, and PubMed are available on the SLU Libraries web site.