Academic Journal Resources for BTEC Students

Data. Can’t work without it, but it’s not always the easiest thing to find. Many students struggle to find quality data when studying for their BTEC HND, so we’ve put together a short list of data sites as a starting point.

Google scholar

We all know how Google works and this is one of the major strengths of Google scholar. It’s a simple but powerful search engine that makes it easy to identify relevant and informative content. Its citations system allows you to see what other people are finding useful and what is being cited. However, you should always cast a careful eye over it as it can be subject to manipulation and not all of the content is free to access.

The Columbia University Academic Commons

This repository of academic articles is freely accessible without registration and can be browsed by subject. One of the smaller libraries’ that we’ve featured, with just over 9,000 articles presently it still has a wealth of quality articles and is worth a visit.

BASE

BASE, also known as Bielefeld Academic Search Engine on formal occasions, is a very powerful search engine. It’s useful for both locating specific articles as well as assisting in meta-analysis. Its user friendly layout means that its easy to browse by subject even if you don’t have a specific title in mind. For example, you can filter by Science > Physics >Modern physics.

CogPrints

CogPrints is a self-archive of papers dedicated to Psychology, Computer science, Biology and Philosophy and is administered by Southampton University. Containing over 2,000 articles, you can search by subject, title and author.

DOAJ

The DOAJ, or Directory of Open Access Journals, does what it says on the label. It’s a directory of just under 9,000 journals, totalling over 1,000,000 articles. All included journals are either peer reviewed or editorially quality controlled, which means that the resulting data is of a high quality. All of the journals are open access, which means no need to purchase anything.

JournalSeek

JournalSeek is a database, containing searchable links to open access journals. Though none of the journals themselves are hosted on the website, there is an entry for each journal as well as links to the journals.

Scirus

Scirus is a search engine that allows users to search over 545 million articles, focusing on scientific articles. By far the largest search engine on the site, it unfortunately contains a great deal of material that requires subscriptions in order to view. However, it is a very useful tool which allows you to search colossal amounts of data.