Research Databases

 If you see this icon next to a database, it means our Library Card is required to access it.

  If you see this icon next to a database, it means the site can only be accessed for free at our library locations by using our Wi-Fi or public computers.  

Research Tips:

• Click here for tips on how to do complex online searches, as well as tips for how to judge the accuracy of your sources. 
• If you are looking for a specific research article and cannot find a free version, try contacting the author. Many academic authors are happy to email you their papers for free.
• Did you find a source? Don't forget to cite it. If you need help, Purdue Online Writing Lab offers descriptions and examples for several styles and formats. A lot of sources will also offer an option for citation, including Google.
• The Library of Congress has your back! Reference librarians have already created several research and general subject guides. You can also search [your topic] + libguide and find libraries that specifically have collections related to your topic; if you are not a member of that library you may not be able to access it, but the libguide can help give you a starting point in your research. 
• Check out our book collection and you can always contact your local branch or HQ for help. 

Databases:

	African Journals OnLine (AJOL) works to increase global & continental online access, awareness, quality & use of African-published, peer-reviewed research.
	All Americans' Stories (a National Park Service program) includes theme studies (which help identify National Historic Landmarks), parks and places, and education and additional resources for American groups and their heritage months.
	The American Archive of Public Broadcasting works to preserve for posterity the most significant public television and radio programs of the past 60 years.
	Archives Unbound (GALE) offers topically-focused digital collections of historical documents that support the research and study needs of scholars and students at the college and university levels. Collections cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages to twentieth-century political history.
	arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive under Cornell University for over 1.6 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering, systems science, and economics.
	Bartleby.com offers a wide range of classic full-text searchable reference works.
	Book Connections provides personalized digital connections to books for kids and teens. The site can also be narrowed down to Children's Books & Author Resources, Teen Books & Author Resources, Children, Teen, and Family Home Kits, and Recursos de lectura para jóvenes y familias. Need help? See their support page or contact them at 510-239-7391 | accounts@bookconnections.org. (See also the Teaching Connections database listed here.)
	California State Publications has digital copies of the official publications received by the State Library from California governmental agencies.
	Calisphere provides access to digital collections from California's great libraries, archives, and museums and includes over 1,975,000 images, texts, and recordings.
	ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database providing fast text and structure search access to over 100 million structures from hundreds of data sources.
	The Church in the Southern Black Community traces the way Southern African Americans adopted and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life.
	CultureGrams: Concise cultural information on countries around the world. (Recommended grades 3-12.) Need help? See their support page or contact 800-521-0600 | customerservice@proquest.com.
	Department of Energy Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science (DOE PAGES) offers free public access to the best available full-text version of DOE-funded scholarly publications - either the peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript or the published scientific journal article - after an administrative interval of 12 months.
	Destiny Discovery provides access to the CA Missions Collection.
	The Dickinson Electronic Archives (1994-2012) features critical and theoretical work about Emily Dickinson's writings, biography, reception, and influence. See also Radical Scatters.
	The Digital Library contains digitized material from the London School of Economics and Political Science Library collections and contains newspapers, journals, pamphlets, leaflets, reports, images, and more.
	Digital Public Library of America offers over 43 million images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States. (Also provides research guides.)
	Directory of Open Access Books provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited collections published under an open-access license, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository.
	Directory of Open Access Journals contains over 15,000 peer-reviewed open-access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
	Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents collection includes papers promoting and opposing white supremacy, published mainly in the 1920s.
	Encyclopedia Britannica provides a comprehensive interactive resource for research and learning for grades K-12. Includes correlations to CA Content Standards and other valuable teacher resources. Click on the link and it offers you versions aimed at Elementary School kids (also available in Spanish), Middle School kids (also available in Spanish), and High School kids.  Need help? See their support page or contact them at (800) 621-3900 x 7160 | edsupport@eb.com. Encyclopedia Britannica ofrece un recurso interactivo integral para los estudios y el aprendizaje de los grados de jardín de infantes a duodécimo. Incluye correlaciones con los Estándares de Contenido de California y otros recursos valiosos para maestros. Haga clic en los siguientes enlaces y le ofrecerá el sitio web para niños de primaria o secundaria en español.
	Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade is a collection of documents on the lives of individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in the historical trade.
	Europeana works with thousands of European archives, libraries, and museums to share cultural heritage for enjoyment, education, and research. This website gives you access to millions of books, music, artwork, and more. (Europeana is an initiative of the European Union, financed by the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility and European Union Member States.)
	Gov Info provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government. It is a service of the United States Government Publishing Office (GPO), which is a Federal agency in the legislative branch.
	HathiTrust offers access to 17+ million digitized items from libraries around the world.
	HEARTH is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance.
	The Historic Government Publications from World War II contains 343 Informational pamphlets, government reports, instructions, regulations, declarations, speeches, and propaganda materials distributed by the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) during the Second World War.
	The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection is currently the world’s largest online archive of open-access, full-image Japanese American and other overseas Japanese newspapers in Asia and South America.
	The Homeland Security Digital Library (HSDL) is the collection of documents related to homeland security policy, strategy, and organizational management by the US Government.
	ibiblio is a large “collection of collections” with freely available software and information, for topics such as music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies.
	ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.
	iFixit: Repair guides for everything, written by everyone.
	In Context: Environmental Studies (GALE) - Understand environmental issues that affect people globally through topic overviews, journals, news, and multimedia content.
	Independent Voices is an open-access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines, and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press, and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
	The Indigenous Digital Archive provides documents about the history of US government Indian boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries.
	Interactive Science (GALE) - Manipulate 3D interactive models to visualize and understand concepts in biology, chemistry, earth, and space science.
	The International Music Score Library Project (Petrucci Music Library) contains the world’s public domain music, including over 500,000 scores and almost 19,000 composers.
	The International Nuclear Information System (INIS) hosts one of the world's largest collections of published information on the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology.
	Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. They also provide 25+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine.
	The Journal of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (J-ETD) is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal advancing the theory and practice of producing, hosting, and indexing student scholarship that exists in digital format in the institutional repositories of universities.
	The Journal of Political Ecology publishes research into the linkages between political economy and human environmental impacts, across different locations and academic disciplines. Submissions are in English, French, and Spanish.
	J-STAGE is an electronic journal platform for science and technology information in Japan, developed and managed by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).
	JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. (Independent researchers can register for free and access 6 articles 100 articles every thirty days during COVID-19.)
	The Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers collection provides the press of more than twenty cities, spanning the Chinese mainland and the entire half-century.
	Library of Congress Digital Collections provides access to a rich, diverse, and enduring source of knowledge, including images, maps, texts, sounds, and more.
	Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through Reconstruction.
	ManualsLib provides over 4 million online manuals for several different products.
	MetPublications, provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gives access to out-of-print book titles on subjects like art, archeology, architecture, history, fashion, and more.
	The National Archives and Records Administration is the nation's record keeper. Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept. See also the Federal Register.
	The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. Includes sub-databases like PubMed; Bookshelf; PubMed Central; BLAST; Nucleotide; Genome; SNP; Gene; Protein; and PubChem. Also includes PubSpace, which provides public access to NASA-funded research articles.
	National Geographic Kids (GALE) - Explore amazing adventures in science, nature, culture, archaeology, and space. Best for children aged 6–14.
	The NASA STI Repository provides access to NASA metadata records, full-text online documents, images, and videos. The types of information included are conference papers, journal articles, meeting papers, patents, research reports, images, movies, and technical videos – scientific and technical information created or funded by NASA. See also PubSpace, which provides public access to NASA-funded research articles.
	The Official Document System (ODS) is an online database of full-text, born-digital UN documents published from 1993 onward, including documents of the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council, and their subsidiaries.
	OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man) is a continuously updated catalog of human genes and genetic disorders and traits, with a particular focus on the molecular relationship between genetic variation and phenotypic expression.
	The Online Archive of CA provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.
	Online Library of Liberty is a curated collection of scholarly works focused on individual liberty and free markets.
	The OpenNet database provides easy, timely access to approximately 512,000 bibliographic references and over 130,000 with attached full text, including information declassified in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
	Persée provides a collection of scientific journals in social and human sciences, established by the Ministry of State Education, Higher Education, and Research. (Site is available in English and French.)
	The Perseus Digital Library Project mainly focuses on the history, literature, and culture of the Greco-Roman world.
	PLOS provides science and medical research.
	The Prize Papers Online: Atlas offers a wealth of information about ships and their crews, providing unprecedented insights into the workings of the maritime sector during the Age of Sail. (Covers the period between 1775 and 1783.)
	ProQuest provides reference help and research articles, videos, and books using six different databases of content. (Recommended grades 3-12.) Need help? See their support page or contact 800-521-0600 | customerservice@proquest.com.
	The Public Health Image Library (PHIL) offers an organized, universal electronic gateway to CDC's pictures.
	RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of 102 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences by offering a decentralized bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, book chapters, and software components.
	ResearchGate is a professional network for scientists and researchers to share, discover, and discuss research.
	Sage Publishing provides more than 1,000 journals from a wide range of disciplines. (Not all articles will be available to you; look for the unlocked icon by the article title.)
	Smithsonian Open Access where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
	The speech accent archive provides a sound control bar, a set of the answers to 7 demographic questions, a phonetic transcription of the sample,1 a set of the speaker's phonological generalizations, a link to a map showing the speaker's place of birth, and a link to the Ethnologue language database.
	Teachingbooks.net is a website dedicated to enriching every student's reading experience and offers book guides, meet-the-author movies, vocabulary lists, help to build your booklists, and so much more. (See also the Book Connections database listed here.)
	Ubiquity Press is an open-access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals and books, and next-generation institutional repositories.
	The U.S. Board on Geographic Names maintains uniform geographic name usage throughout the Federal Government and provides information on the principles, policies, and procedures governing the use of domestic names, foreign names, Antarctic names, and undersea feature names.
	U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's online collection of public domain still photographs, videos, documents, audio, and maps.
	We Wear Culture is the Google database sharing the stories behind what we wear.
	zbMATH Open (formerly known as Zentralblatt MATH) is the world's most comprehensive and longest-running abstracting and reviewing service in pure and applied mathematics. See also the Jahrbuch Project – Electronic Research Archive for Mathematics (ERAM).
	Zooniverse is research made possible by volunteers — anyone can come to assist professional researchers.

The above databases are supported in part or whole by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian: GALE databases, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Book Connections / Teaching Books. 

Plumas County Library is a member of the North State Cooperative Library System and NorthNet Library System.