Finding Journal Articles: Religious Studies

One of the most common ways that scholars share their research is through academic journal articles (which are also called "scholarly journal articles," "peer-reviewed journal articles," and other similar terms).

For most topics, OneSearch is a good place to start. 

To find a specific article (for example, if it's on a reading list or you have a citation), put the title in "quotation marks" and search.

To find articles about a topic or person, search for names or keywords that you would expect relevant articles to use. For example:

  • if you're looking for articles about Dorothy Day, try searching for "dorothy day" OR "day, dorothy"
  • if you're looking for articles about Buddhism in China, you might start by searching for buddhism AND china

It can be tricky to search for people who are mononymous (only use one name), who are known mostly by a title or nickname, or who have changed their name. This includes saints, popes, lamas, patriarchs, deities, members of some religious orders, and some notable rabbis. 

If you're not sure what to search for, ask the Religious Studies librarian. They can give advice about what search terms to use, where to search, and how to make sure you're finding the sources you need.

Once you've done a search, use the Academic (Peer Reviewed) Journals button under the search box to focus on scholarly/peer-reviewed journal articles. You can also choose Available (online) if you only want to see the things that are available for you to read immediately online, or find Available (print & online) on the All Filters menu to include items that are physically in Robertson Library.

Use the Access Options dropdown to read an article. If you see an option that says anything about full text, or a PDF, or Check@UPEI, or Online Access, that link should take you to the full text of the article. If you have questions or have found a broken link, you can ask at the Library Service Desk, via our Ask Us chat, or by e-mailing reference@upei.ca.

If you only see a link that says Make an Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Request, that means that we don't have immediate access to the article, but we can try to get a copy from another library for you. Learn more about Interlibrary Loan.

 

Here is a list of databases and other tools that are sometimes useful for Religious Studies research. Many, but not all, of these are also searched by OneSearch. If you have questions about which database to use, or how to search in a particular database, please contact the Religious Studies librarian.

Title Description
Academic Search Complete A multi-disciplinary database which provides full text for more than 8,500 periodicals, including full text for over 7,300 peer-reviewed journals.
America: History and Life The definitive index of literature covering the history & culture of the US & Canada, from prehistory to the present. Indexes 1,700 journals.
ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials

The definitive index for religious and theological literature. Covers all aspects of theology and world religions. ATLA provides some useful short video tutorials including "Three Methods to Search For Biblical Scripture Citations".
Catholic Research Resources

The Catholic Research Resources Alliance website has two resources of note: Catholic Portal, which allows users to identify items in a wide variety of research collections, and Catholic News Archive, a text-searchable collection of over 30,000 issues of Catholic newspapers with a focus on dioceses in the United States.
China: Trade, Politics and Culture, 1793-1980 (Adam Matthew Digital) Unique manuscript material relating to the activities & observations of British & American diplomats, missionaries, & others in China from 1793-1980.
Gale OneFile: Religion and Philosophy

Religion & Philosophy Collection features a selection of more than 200 magazines and academic journals--everything from Anglican Journal to Zygon--covering religion and the related areas of philosophy and anthropology. Researchers can use this database not only to study theological approaches to social issues, but also to learn about the impact that religion has had on culture throughout history, including literature, arts, and language. Coverage, which includes more than 1.1 million articles updated daily, begins as early as 1980 for indexing and 1983 for periodical full text.
 

(Description provided by the database publisher, Gale/Cengage)
Historical Abstracts (European and World history) Indexes key historical journals, as well as a targeted selection of journals in the social sciences and humanities.
InteLex Past Masters Past Masters contains 117 fulltext humanities databases, both in the original language and in English translation.
JSTOR

Provides access to archival issues of over 4,500 scholarly journals across most academic disciplines. Includes primary source materials.

The collections are the following: Arts & Sciences I to XV, Business IV, Hebrew Journals, Ireland, Life Sciences, Lives of Literature, Public Health, Security Studies, Sustainability, Global Plants, Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa, World Heritage Sites: Africa, and 19th Century British Pamphlets.

JSTOR also now includes over a half-million images from the ArtStor  "public collection", described as "images, videos, documents, and audio files from museums, archives, libraries, and faculty collections". Eventually all 1.3 million images currently accessible on the ArtStor platform will also be on the JSTOR platform.

Authentication note: If you create your own personal account within the UPEI institutional account, you can access everything UPEI has licensed by logging into that account directly from on or off campus without going through our proxy server. That is good for 365 days and can be easily renewed.

Faculty: If you want an entire class to have their own accounts, you can provide collections@upei.ca with a list of student email addresses, and we can upload them all in a batch - students will get email invites that they need to accept, but it makes the process much easier, if you want to use the collaborative research tools in the "JSTOR Workspace".
Oxford Academic

Oxford journals (about 240) and ebooks purchased from Oxford. This does NOT include the Oxford English Dictionary which is on its own platform.
Papal Encyclicals Online A collection of encyclicals and materials from Catholic church councils. This is not an official website of the Vatican or the Catholic Church, but it does link to the Vatican's website when recent materials are available there.
Project MUSE Includes the full text of over 320 scholarly journals in the Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences fields.
Robertson Library Catalogue

 

What's in the Catalogue?

The Catalogue contains information about many of the print, borrowable, and reference materials at the Robertson Library. It contains

What's not in the Catalogue?

Many of our resources are outside of the catalogue. These include:

Can I log in?

Yes, you can log in to the Catalogue to place holds or renew your borrowed items. Use your UPEI username and password.

Who supports the Catalogue?

The Metadata and Systems teams at the Robertson Library support the Catalogue. Contact Rosie Le Faive for metadata issues and Courtney Matthews for technical concerns.

The Catalogue has been self-hosted on Evergreen, an open-source ILS software, since 2008.

 

 
Thesaurus linguae Latinae (TLL)

A massive dictionary of Latin.  As of December 2019, the project includes A-M, O-P. It is expected to be completed by 2050.

This is not a Latin-English translation dictionary, but more akin to what the Oxford English Dictionary is for English.

It is being provided open access (free) in large PDF chunks on this website.

A New York Times article describes it thus:

Most dictionaries focus on the most prominent or recent meaning of a word; this one aims to show every single way anyone ever used it, from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the sixth century B.C. to around A.D. 600. The dictionary’s founder, Eduard Wölfflin, who died in 1908, described entries in the T.L.L. not as definitions, but “biographies” of words.

The first entry, for the letter A, was published in 1900. The T.L.L. is expected to reach its final word — “zythum,” an Egyptian beer — by 2050. A scholarly project of painstaking exactness and glacial speed, it has so far produced 18 volumes of huge pages with tiny text, the collective work of nearly 400 scholars, many of them long since dead. The letters Q and N were set aside, because they begin too many difficult words, so researchers will have to go back and work on those, too.
Web of Science (Backfile)

Backfile thru December 2009 for Web of Science (WOS) Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) & Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI)

 

Why just the backfile? See the Web of Science Subscription 2010.

 

Created by: Sharon Clark, B.A., M.L.I.S.
Date Created: 09-July-2001


Revised by: Suzanne Jones, B.A., M.L.S., and Katelyn Browne, B.S., M.S.L.S.
Date Revised: 21-August-2024

Not specified