Hello Everyone, As I move forward with my dissertation, I'm looking for scholarly literature/dissertation sources. Does anyone know of any great FREE online resources? Thank you!
I used this and would spend 4-5 days just downloading 100's of papers for future review. Hope it works well for you - SAGE Journals Online -- Current Free Trials They seem to change what is available for free from month to month but here is a complete list of what they offer - http://online.sagepub.com/browse/by/discipline
Are you a member of your local Library? They generally subscribe to all of the major academic online databases, and the cost to join is free or a nominal fee. A list of Public Libraries can be found here. Your undergrad and grad schools also may allow access to thier libraries, (again, for a small fee). Also, some of the major universities may allow you to access thier files as a "Friend" of thier library. I have found pdfs of a great deal of my academic sources through Google. Worldcat is a good place to start as is ERIC for educational sources. The Free Library appears to be useful as well. A list of Open Access Databases can be found at the University of Milwaulkee Madison . . Questia looks interesting, but the price is not revealed. LIBWEB is a comprehensive list of all types of Libraries around the world. I hope this gets you started in the right direction.
Your school should be able to provide you with everything you need. As others have noted, academic libraries in your area usually offer a community membership for a limited fee or even free.
Aspen has a less than stellar library (one database source), but at the price I paid, I cannot complain. APUS and NCU have decent libraries, as did UOP, as I recall.
Do you still have your UOP login? You might be able to access the UOP library. I have no complaints about LU's library.
No, but I can use the other sources that I mentioned, plus the Pentagon Library and APUS (I teach there).
Where I live, any citizen of the state has access to the state university library citizen by virtue of being a tax payer. My experience is that the librarians in these systems love to help people with these sorts of research problems. Many of the people you'll run into are Library Science students doing work study and so you'll get a big empathy reaction when you explain your situation.
I'm blessed... within a very short distance of my home, I have access the libraries of NC State University, UNC Chapel Hill, and Duke. I don't have check-out privileges in any of those, but whenever I've wanted to use anything IN the library, I've felt very welcome. Even at Duke, which is a private school, the librarians are extremely helpful.
Even though I had a great deal of access to databases and such when I was enrolled at Capella, I was a guest member of the University of Minnesota's library which was 3 hours away. Physical libraries have...books! In addition, most of my serious writing was done there, away from the distractions of work, home, etc. Reference librarians are awesome! Shawn
Google Scholar works great. What I found more important however, is how do you read/process/track/relate/remember all the information you find? This article nails it: SciPlore Blog » Blog Archive » How to write a thesis (Bachelor, Master, or PhD) and which software tools to use . I wish found this much earlier in my dissertation stage.