Looking at the stats for this blog, it looks like many people who come here do so after googling “full text human rights articles” or something similar.
For those looking for full text articles on human rights, there is good news and there is bad.
First the bad: Using Google, Yahoo!, or any other internet search engine is going to provide very limited results. You may come up with a random article that someone cut and pasted and added to their website. You may come up with essays on human rights that people have written on personal blogs. Unfortunately, neither of these results are appropriate for academic human rights research.
Instead, you need to find articles in peer-reviewed journals. Examples of peer reviewed journals include titles like The Journal of Human Rights and Human Rights Quarterly, While there are a few journals freely available online, such as the Harvard Human Rights Journal, the bulk of them are only available through subscription databases such as Academic Onefile (formerly InfoTrac), Proquest Research Library, J-STOR, Academic Search, etc.
But now the good news! University students only need to go to their school’s library website to access subscription databases for their research. UConn students have a number of tools available to them for finding journal articles.
The Human Rights Research Guide, http://classguides.lib.uconn.edu/humanrights, has an entire page devoted to databases and finding journal articles on a variety of human rights subjects. For UConn students, all you have to do is click on the database links. (If you’re off campus, login to the UConn Virtual Private Network (VPN) first.)
Once you’re inside the database, many of them have ways to search for full text articles only. But what if the perfect article for your paper comes up and it isn’t available full text?
For example, this citation, taken from the PAIS International database. The article does not come up as full text.
Global Challenges: Climate Chaos and the Future of Development.
IDS Bulletin, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 36-39, Mar 2007
… development issues including economic growth & equity, human rights & wellbeing. He argues that the growth of the West was made possible by unsustainable exploitation of carbon resources & the colonies, & this can never again be repeated. The …
View Record | InterLibrary Loan |
But, don’t despair!
Click on the button at the bottom of the citation. When you do this, a new window opens telling you that UConn does in fact have this article available full text in another database.
If you find an article that isn’t available full text in any of UConn’s databases, you can request the article through Document Delivery/Inter-Library Loan (DD/ILL) and a pdf copy will be emailed to you within 2-5 days.
For human rights articles in particular, here are a couple of databases that I recommend.
Includes most disciplines (multidisciplinary) with good coverage of both popular and scholarly publications. Click on the boxes to limit to peer reviewed articles. Can also limit search to full text only.
Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO)
Articles and reports on international affairs. Includes scholarly articles, papers from university research institutes and non-governmental organizations, foundation-funded research projects, and conference proceedings.