21 LEGIT RESEARCH DATABASES FOR FREE JOURNAL ARTICLES IN 2022
ntrigued, you search for keywords related to your topic, only to discover that you must pay a hefty subscription fee to access the service. After the umpteenth time being duped, you begin to wonder if there’s even such a thing as free journal articles.
Subscription fees and paywalls are often the bane of students and academics, especially those at small institutions who don’t provide access to many free article directories and repositories.
Whether you’re working on an undergraduate paper, a PhD dissertation, or a medical research study, we want to help you find tools to locate and access the information you need to produce well-researched, compelling, and innovative work.

Features of Legitimate OA Journals
There are things to look out for when trying to decide if a free publication journal is legitimate:
- Mission statement—The mission statement for an OA journal should be available on their website.
- Publication history—Is the journal well established? How long has it been available?
- Editorial board—Who are the members of the editorial board, and what are their credentials?
- Indexing—Can the journal be found in a reliable database?
- Peer review—What is the peer review process? Does the journal allow enough time in the process for a reliable assessment of quality?
- Impact factor—What is the average number of times the journal is cited over a two-year period?
