The Wikipedia Library/Databases

The Wikipedia Library

Database requests:
We get you free access to high quality paywalled research databases

We contact publishers and receive full, free database access donations for Wikipedia editors to use to improve articles. These partnerships are available to all global editors. Signups are currently hosted on English Wikipedia, but that is only because other communities don't have Wikipedia Library branches yet! Once your community has its own branch, you can coordinate local signups there.

In order for us to develop a database access program in your community, we need to find at least two local coordinators to work with us (and set up a local library branch if one doesn't yet exist). Then we set up a Journal requests page using the kit.

All global editors can receive an access account if they meet these criteria:

• They are active in the subject area of the database
• They have at least a 6-month-old account
• They have made at least 500 edits to Wikimedia projects
• They are in good standing in the community and have not been blocked within the last 6 months.

Local library coordinators approve (or deny) requests based on those criteria. In order to deliver access, coordinators contact editors to either deliver access codes from publishers, or to collect email addresses so publishers can deliver codes. That information is kept confidential between Wikipedia Library coordinators, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the journal publishers. Our coordinators have signed non-disclosure agreements supporting the safe and responsible handling of private data and limiting its sharing.

Do you have an idea for a database we should have, in any language? Suggest it!

Contact a Wikipedia Library representative to set up journal requests in your community

General scholarship

Alexander Street (English)

• available Alexander Street's Academic Video Online is a large academic video collection good for a wide range of subjects, including news programs (such as PBS and BBC), music and theatre, lectures and demonstrations, and documentaries.

Al Manhal (Arabic, English)

• available Al Manhal is a major Arabic provider of full-text electronic journals, theses and ebooks. It includes approximately 36,000 publications across a variety of subject areas, with coverage in Arabic, English, and several other languages.

Brill (English, Dutch)

• waitlist Brill is a publisher of academic e-books and journals primarily in the humanities and social sciences, but also law and science. Brill Online Books and Journals includes 250,000 chapters and articles on a variety of topics.

Cambridge (English)

• waitlist Cambridge University Press is a major publisher of academic journals and e-books in a variety of subject areas. Access includes both Cambridge Journals Online and Cambridge Books.

De Gruyter (English, German)

• available De Gruyter is a scholarly publisher specializing in academic literature in a variety of subject areas. They have generously offered the use of 1000 accounts to access all of the electronic resources available through De Gruyter Online, which include ebooks and journals in arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, theology/religion, medicine, mathematics, law and general reference. Their offerings include resources in English, German, and several other languages.

EBSCO (English and others)

• available EBSCO is offering access to a large number of databases including Academic Search Complete, a multidisciplinary academic database that includes peer-reviewed journals as well as periodicals, reports and books; Business Source Complete, a comprehensive database of business-related sources and information; and MasterFILE Complete, a collection of full-text general-interest resources.

Emerald (English)

• available Emerald Publishing Group provides journals on a range of topics, including business and management, education, technology, library and information science, engineering, and health care.

Gale (English and others)

• available Gale is an American educational publisher offering access to four resources: Academic OneFile, a database of peer-reviewed academic articles in a variety of subject areas; General OneFile, a periodicals collection; Infotrac Newsstand, full-text articles from 1800 newspapers; and selected content from Gale Virtual Reference Library.

Jamalon (Arabic, English)

• available Jamalon is the largest bookstore in the Middle East. It is offering to ship physical books to 50 editors. Books on a variety of topics are available, in both English and Arabic.

JSTOR (English, German, Spanish)

• waitlist JSTOR is one of the largest and most reputable journal archives in the world.

Kotobna (Arabic)

• available Kotobna.net provides a platform for authors to disseminate ebooks on a variety of topics.

McFarland (English)

• available McFarland & Company is an academic publisher based in North Carolina, in the United States. The company publishes works on a wide variety of topics, and specializes in covering areas often underrepresented in academic literature, such as video games, sports and popular culture. They also publish in a wide variety of more traditional academic areas, such as history, military history, performing arts, medieval studies, film studies, and more. McFarland has offered to send Wikipedia editors electronic copies of books that will aid in Wikipedia article research. E-books are available in PDF and EPUB formats.

Magiran (Persian/Farsi)

• available A digital library of Persian scientific articles.

MIT (English)

• available MIT Press Journals is a scholarly publisher of over 30 journals in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Its journals include Daedalus, International Security, and Artificial Life.

Oxford University Press (English)

• available The Oxford University Press (OUP) is one of the oldest, largest and most reputable academic publishers in the world. They have offered access to several of their humanities databases (including Oxford Art Online, Grove Music Online, American National Biography, Dictionary of National Biography, and Oxford Bibliographies Online), their online journals, and legal resources.

Pelican Books (English)

• (ebooks available to anyone not in the United States) Pelican Books is a reference book publisher and a sister to Penguin Books.

Sabinet (English, Afrikaans, other)

• available Sabinet is an online database of full text South and Southern African journals. It includes coverage of a wide variety of topic areas.

Taylor & Francis

• available Taylor & Francis is an academic publisher of journals and books. As part of a pilot program, Taylor & Francis is offering 30 editors access to each of two subject collections on their digital platform at Taylor & Francis Online: the Arts & Humanities collection, the Biological, Environmental & Earth Sciences collection, and the Strategic, Defence & Security Studies collection.

Humanities and social sciences

Adam Matthew (English)

• available Adam Matthew Digital is a subsidiary of SAGE Publications that focuses on publishing databases of primary sources and accompanying supporting material. For this partnership, we will have access to all 53 of their databases that allow access to a range of collections relevant to major topics in American and World History. We recognize that most of these materials are primary sources; however, the primary sources include period newspapers/publications and the secondary materials supporting the primary sources are strong, providing a variety of different sources for Wikipedia editors.

American Psychological Association (English)

• available APA publishes books and journals related to psychology.

Baylor (English)

• available Baylor University Press is a publisher of academic e-books primarily in religious studies and the humanities.

Bloomsbury

• (open) Bloomsbury is a publisher of en:Who's Who and Who Was Who, Drama Online, Berg Fashion Library, and Whitaker's.

Cairn.info (French, English)

• available Cairn.info is an online web portal of scholarly materials in the humanities and social sciences. Much of the collection is in French, but it also includes an English-language international interface to facilitate use by non-francophones. Primary research areas include communications, economics, education, geography, history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, political science, law, psychology, sociology, and cultural studies. This partnership includes 100 accounts between French and English Wikipedia.

C.H.Beck (German)

• available

Edinburgh University Press (English)

• available Edinburgh University Press publishes journals in the humanities and social sciences.

Érudit (French, English)

• available Érudit is a Canadian web portal of scholarly materials. Its primary focus is the humanities and social sciences, but it also includes some publications in the physical and natural sciences. It includes content in both English and French and is offering a total of 50 accounts.

Finnish Literature Society (Finnish)

• available Finnish cultural content.

Fold3 (English)

• available Fold3 is a database of documents, images, and other material covering American military history, owned by the genealogical database Ancestry.com. Fold3 has significant collections covering African-American history, Native American history, the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the US Bureau of Investigation, Project Blue Book and other aspects of American's history and military organizations and conflicts.

Foreign Affairs (English)

• available Foreign Affairs is an American journal of international relations and U.S. foreign policy.

Gaudeamus (Finnish)

• available Gaudeamus is the publisher of the University of Helsinki, focusing on Humanities and social sciences.

Harmattan (French)

• available L'Harmattan is a French publisher with over 27,000 titles in the humanities and social sciences.

IMF eLibrary

• available The International Monetary Fund is an international US-based organization of 188 countries focused on international trade, financial stability, and economic growth. The IMF eLibrary provides access to IMF publications, including periodicals, studies, ebooks, and statistical tools.

digital Loeb Classics (English, Greek, Latin)

• available The digital Loeb Classical Library is a project of Harvard University Press to make Classical Greek and Latin literature accessible. The virtual collection of classical writings includes epic and lyric poetry, tragedy and comedy, history, travel, philosophy, oratory, medicine, mathematics, and religion – a total of over 520 volumes of Latin, Greek, and English texts.

Miramar Ship Index (English)

• available An index to ships and their histories, covering iron and steel sailing ships, powered merchant ships, and warships, since the early 19th century.

Nomos (German)

• available Law and social science journals

Noormags (Persian, English, Arabic)

• waitlist Noormags is a Iranian publisher with over 900,000 articles from 1,420 magazines in 57,000 issues in the humanities and Islamic sciences.

Numérique Premium (French)

• available Numérique Premium aggregates publications in the humanities and social sciences.

OpenEdition (English)

• available OpenEdition is a publisher of books and journals in the social sciences and humanities. While most of OpenEdition's content is Open Access, they have donated access to Freemium for Journals; an additional collection of 140 usually paywalled journals.

Past Masters (English)

• available The Past Masters database is a collection of definitive scholarly editions of canonical authors' work published by InteLex Corporation. Each work includes an extensive introduction, editorial commentary on textual editing choices, and footnotes contextualizing the work. We have access to two of their ten collections in this initial pilot: The Women Writer's Collection and The Religious Studies Collection. We expect the sources to be useful for individuals interested in expanding the articles about individual works by the authors in the collection and the biographies of the authors as well as the women's, philosophical and religious topics in which the authors were engaged.

Project MUSE (English, French, Spanish)

• available Project MUSE is an online database of more than 600 academic journals and 36,000 ebooks in the humanities and social sciences. The content in Project MUSE represents over 200 university presses and scholarly societies globally

Random House (English, German)

• available

RIPM (English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Russian, Hungarian, Norwegian)

• available RIPM provides access to the largest online collection of rare music periodicals published between 1760 and 1966. Access to RIPM permits use of RIMP's three principle publications:
  • Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1760-1966)
  • RIPM Online Archive of Music Periodicals (Full Text) (Citations found in the Retrospective Index linked to full-text Online Archive)
  • RIPM e-Library of Music Periodicals, a separate full-text collection of journals not found in the Retrospective Index/Online Archive

SAGE Stats (English)

• available Sage Publications is offering access to two statistics-related resources:
  • SAGE Stats, a data platform containing social science data covering geographies within the United States and topics such as healthcare, crime, education, employment, religion, and government finances.
  • US Political Stats collection, which provides data visualizations and research tools related to US Congress, the US Supreme Court, and the US Presidency.

Tilastopaja (Finnish)

• available Tilastopaja is a database offering athletics statistics from Finland and worldwide.

Women Writers Online (English)

• available Women Writers Online is a full-text collection of early women's writing in English, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. It includes full transcriptions of over 350 texts published between 1526 and 1850, particularly materials that are rare or otherwise inaccessible, as well as other materials like contextual essays to assist in researching women's writing.

World Bank

• available World Bank eLibrary is a subscription-based online web portal of all books, working papers, and journal articles published by the World Bank from the 1990s to the present. It covers more than 20 disciplines related to poverty, development, and social science including economic and human development, agriculture, infrastructure, health, education, climate change, natural resources, and regional integration.

Law

HeinOnline (English)

• available HeinOnline is an online, fully-searchable, image-based database of over 2000 legal journals and other resources related to legal history. It is "the world's largest image-based legal research collection and contains more than 9 centuries of legal history".

Medical

ASHA (English)

• available ASHA, the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association, is a professional association for speech–language pathologists, audiologists, and speech, language, and hearing scientists; it publishes journals of interest to these groups.

American Psychiatric Association

• (open) The American Psychiatric Association are providing access to PsychiatryOnline; books and journals from the field of psychiatry.

Annual Reviews (English)

• available Annual Reviews is a publisher of review articles in the sciences and social sciences. Its articles cover major topics in each subject area every few years, with other special topics appearing occasionally. This partnership provides access to their Biomedical Life collection.

BMJ (English)

• available BMJ is a peer-reviewed medical journal. It is one of the world's oldest general medical journals and has been described as among the most prestigious. It was originally called the British Medical Journal.

The Cochrane Library (English)

• available Cochrane Collaboration is an independent medical nonprofit organization consisting of a group of over 28,000 volunteers in more than 100 countries. The collaboration was formed to organize medical scholarship in a systematic way in the interests of evidence-based research. The group conducts systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials of health-care interventions, which is then published by Wiley-Blackwell in The Cochrane Library.

DynaMed Plus (English)

• available DynaMed is a point-of-care clinical reference tool that includes more than 3,400 topics covering diseases, conditions, drugs and more. Created by physicians for physicians, DynaMed provides the most current information with validity, relevance and convenience making DynaMed an indispensable resource for answering most clinical questions. DynaMed clinical faculty monitors the content of over 500 medical journals on a daily basis. Each article is evaluated for clinical relevance and scientific validity. The new evidence is then integrated with existing content, and overall conclusions are changed as appropriate, representing a synthesis of the best available evidence.

Royal Pharmaceutical Society (English)

• available The Royal Pharmaceutical Society is an scholarly organization in the United Kingdom which acts as "the dedicated professional body for pharmacists in England, Scotland and Wales". They have generously offered the use of 100 one-year accounts that will include four resources: The Pharmaceutical Journal, the official weekly journal of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, provides information and analysis on the latest advances in any branch of pharmacy practice and pharmaceutical science throughout the world; Clinical Pharmacist concentrates on issues of direct relevance to hospital pharmacists, primary care pharmacists and leading-edge community practitioners, the publication enables readers to keep abreast of current advances in their discipline and assists them in expanding their professional skills and knowledge; Tomorrows Pharmacist investigates the realities of a career in the pharmaceutical sciences; and additional premium learning resources.

• See also biomedical resources under "Sciences"

Newspapers, genealogy

HighBeam Research (English)

• available HighBeam Research is an online, subscription-based search engine for newspapers, magazines, academic journals, newswires, trade magazines and encyclopedias. The site has access to over 80 million articles from 6,500 publications, most of which are not available free elsewhere on the internet. Thousands of new articles are added daily, archives date back over 25 years including trade journal, newspaper articles, and peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of subjects and industries; and there are tools for finding, saving, organizing, and sharing information as documents.

Keesing's (English)

• available Keesing's was founded in 1931 with the intention of creating a lasting archive of original, accurate, and objective articles on the world's political, social, and economic events." The team of writers and editors based in Cambridge, UK create concise, clear articles published every month that provide readers with a digestible, detailed summary of global news.

Newspaperarchive.com (English)

• available NewspaperARCHIVE.com is an online database of digitized newspapers. Its coverage extends from 1607 to the present and includes the US, Canada, the UK, and 20 other countries.

Newspapers.com (English)

• available Newspapers.com is a newspaper database in the family of companies associated with Ancestry.com. Their database includes more than 73 million pages from 3,000-plus newspapers, mostly local United States papers with some Canadian and elsewhere. It is particularly suited for Wikipedia content about the 18th, 19th and the first 3⁄4 of the 20th century in the United States and global topics affecting the United States. The collection includes some major newspapers for limited periods (i.e., 50 years of the New York Times), but mostly consists of regional papers from the 1700s onward. Very few titles go beyond the late 1980s.

Questia Online Library (English)

• available Questia is an online research library for books and journal articles focusing on the humanities and social sciences. Questia has curated titles from over 300 trusted publishers, including 77,000 full-text books and 4 million journal, magazine, and newspaper articles, as well as encyclopedia entries.

Sciences

AAAS journals (English)

• available AAAS is "the world's largest general science society". The society is offering access to the resources on its website, sciencemag.org, which include the journal Science and other scientific research, news, commentary, and media. This partnership has 50 available accounts.

Civilica (Persian/Farsi)

• available Civilica is a database of Iranian journal articles, conference papers, and magazines.

EDP Sciences (French, English)

• available Édition Diffusion Presse Sciences is a scientific publisher of journals.

Elsevier ScienceDirect (English, French, German)

• available Elsevier is an academic publishing company that publishes medical and scientific literature, as a "provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions—among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Elsevier Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey—and publishes nearly 2,200 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and over 25,000 book titles." Elsevier has donated ScienceDirect access in three streams: Health & Life Sciences, Social & Behavioral Sciences, and Physical Sciences. ScienceDirect is their full-text database with "almost a quarter of the world's peer-reviewed scientific content". The database includes over 2,500 journals, 900 serials and 26,000 book titles.

Future Science Group (English)

• available Future Science Group is a publisher of medical, biotechnological and scientific research.

Royal Society of Chemistry Gold (English)

• available The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is a learned society in the United Kingdom with the goal of "advancing the chemical sciences". They publish a variety of scientific journals across all fields of chemical research.

Royal Society journals (English)

• available The Royal Society, the UK's National Academy for science, offers access to journal collections in three streams: Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, and History of Science.

World Scientific (English)

• available World Scientific provides access to scientific, technical, and medical journals.

Ympäristö-lehti (Finnish)

• available Ympäristö-lehti is the magazine published by the Finnish Environment Institute

Old partnerships

Credo Reference (English)

• (partnership pending renewal) Credo Reference is a collection of online reference works.

Public Catalogue Foundation (English)

• closed The Public Catalogue Foundation has a catalogue of all the publicly owned oil paintings in the United Kingdom. This is freely available online, but also exists in book form and they have given a limited number of books to Wikipedia editors via Wikimedia UK

BNA (British Newspaper Archives) (English)

• closed The British Newspaper Archive (BNA) is a newspaper database gathered from the British Library's holdings of newspapers (for more information on what gets digitized see the discussion of the partnership). This database is particularly suited for 18th, 19th and early 20th century British and Global news events and people content: their current collection includes mostly regional papers and very few titles go beyond the 1950s, many stopping in the early twentieth century.

FindMyPast.com (English)

• closed Find My Past (FMP) is a UK-based genealogical database containing a number of different records related to biographies. This database would be best used for verifying material related to peoples from the UK (though the database includes records from other countries as well, including a substantial amount of US and Canadian records).

Scotland's People (English)

• closed ScotlandsPeople is an online archive containing almost 90 million records covering genealogical information related to Scotland. The site is a partnership between National Records of Scotland, Court of the Lord Lyon and D. C. Thomson & Co. We recognize that most of these materials are primary sources but they should assist Wikipedia editors in improving Scottish biographical articles.

Suggest a journal?

Do you wish we had access to a reliable journal, database or other resource that would benefit a meaningful number of Wikipedians? Add it to our requests subpage.