LibGuides: African Diaspora: Scholarly Journal Articles

Recommended Databases

Indexes and Databases bring together a number of different online journals and other resources into one search tool. Both scholarly and popular articles may be included. The Library subscribes to hundreds of databases (over 400). Some are very specialized and include publications on a specific subject (ex. history) or format types (ex. scholarly articles). To determine if a database is suitable for your needs, read the coverage descriptions carefully.

Specialized Databases

Black Studies Center
Consists of: Schomburg studies on the Black experience, International index of Black periodicals (IIBP), The Chicago defender, ProQuest dissertations for Black studies, and Black literature index. This fully cross-searchable gateway to Black studies includes scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, and much more.
Black Drama
Contains approximately 1200 plays by 201 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. The database also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
Black Thought and Culture
Provides approximately 100,000 pages of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to 1975. Includes the works of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey,Malcolm X and many others.
Black Women Writers
Coverage of African American women begins in the eighteenth century with narratives depicting slavery, moves through and beyond the Harlem Renaissance, and includes writers from the movements of the 1960s, covering womanism, black feminism, and related topics.

Complimentary Databases

Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly
CPI.Q is Gale’s award-winning full-text resource specifically designed to provide instant access to the most requested Canadian reference materials. Covering a wide range of disciplines, CPI.Q is the perfect one-stop resource for researchers in need of information from Canadian-focused journals, magazines, newspapers and reference sources.
Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI)
This mainly Spanish language resource indexes over 265,000 journal article citations about Central America, South America and the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil. A valuable alternative to the mainly North American perspective of most English language resources.
Sociological Abstracts
Indexes over 2,500 journals in the field of sociology. Includes international and Canadian content. Articles, as well as unpublished materials, such as conference papers and theses, are indexed. Coverage is from 1986 - present
America: History & Life
Indexes articles on the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.
Historical Abstracts
Covers world history, excluding North America, from 1450 to the present era. It indexes journals from around the world and also includes books and dissertations. Coverage is from 1954 - present.
Caribbean Abstracts
Abstracts of books and articles in the humanities and social sciences which are held at the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology (Netherlands) from 1989 to 2008.
JSTOR
Used by millions for research, teaching, and learning. With more than a thousand academic journals and over 1 million images, letters, and other primary sources, JSTOR is one of the world's most trusted sources for academic content.

Search with Keywords

Think of keywords that are commonly used to describe your topic. As you search, make note of related vocabulary to help you locate materials connected to your topic.

Find the Full-Text

Some databases feature citations to articles and abstracts (also called summaries).

To locate the full-text of an article, click the "Find it @ York" link if a PDF or html version of the text is not visible in the item record.

Online Tutorials

SPARK - Student Papers & Academic Research Kit