Research Guides: African American and Black Diaspora Studies: Finding Articles

Finding Articles

NYU Libraries has access to over 1,200 databases that cover a wide range of topics. Use the Databases tab on the NYU Libraries website to find articles as well as historical newspapers, images, and more.

Not sure where to start? We've curated a list of African American and Black Diaspora Studies specific research databases that would be useful at any point in the research process.

Strategic Searching

There are three standard operators that can be used to connect these search words: AND, OR, and NOT.

Use AND to narrow down results and tell the database that the search terms used on either side of AND must all be present.
- Example: ("mass incarceration" AND recidivism AND "racial bias")
Use OR to broaden search results and tell the database the results should contain any of the terms included.
- Example: ("mass incarceration" OR "prison industrial complex" OR "prison pipeline")
Use NOT to exclude a word or phrase from the search results.
- Example: ("prison labor" NOT "prison labour")

Check for tips on searching provided by the database (i.e., ProQuest Central has a Search tip link that helps turn a basic search into a more strategic one). Remember to try various keyword combinations, synonyms and alternative spellings (i.e., person of color or person of colour).

Databases

General and Multidisciplinary

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides access to scholarly journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to journal articles, users can access book chapters, ebooks, and primary source documents.
EBSCO Discovery Service This link opens in a new window
EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) encompasses articles in databases across many disciplines. Users can locate peer reviewed articles, videos, audio files, images, and more from a range of subjects.

Full download of DRM-protected ebooks requires EBSCO account registration and Adobe Digital Editions.
Note: NYU Libraries is retiring EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) in June 2025. The Catalog Search replaces EDS as the tool for searching across multiple publishers’ databases and platforms. You can also use EBSCOhost to search across the full set of EBSCO-only databases.
ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window
ProQuest Central is a large, multidisciplinary database with over 11,000 titles, with over 8,000 titles in full-text. It serves as the central resource for researchers at all levels in all markets. Over 160 subjects areas are covered extensively in this product including business and economics, health and medical, news and world affairs, technology, social sciences and more.

Subject Specific

African American Archives (via Fold3) This link opens in a new window
This full text resource offers access to original documents that reveal a side of the African American story that few have seen before.
African American Communities This link opens in a new window
African American Communities explores multiple aspects of the African American community through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, correspondence, official records, visual images, and oral histories.The collection focuses predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and towns and cities in North Carolina.
African Diaspora, 1860-Present This link opens in a new window
African Diaspora, 1860-Present provides an understanding of Black history and culture, and allows scholars to study the migrations, communities, and ideologies of the African Diaspora through the voices of people of African descent. With a focus on communities in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France, the collection includes digitized primary source documents, including personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera.
Black Studies Center This link opens in a new window
Black Studies Center is a fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, the Schomburg Studies, and much more. It combines several resources for research and teaching in Black Studies: Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP), historical black newspapers, and the Black Literature Index.
Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
Contains 1297 sources with 1100 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African-Americans. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. Where possible the complete published non-fiction works are included, as well as interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamphlets, letters and other fugitive material.
History Vault: Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle This link opens in a new window
ProQuest History Vault's coverage of the Black Freedom Struggle offers the opportunity to study the most well-known and also unheralded events of the Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century from the perspective of the men, women, and sometimes even children who waged one of the most inspiring social movements in American history. This category consists of the NAACP Papers and federal government records, organizational records, and personal papers regarding the Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century.
Digital Library of the Caribbean This link opens in a new window
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. It provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical, and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections. Resources are in English, French, Spanish, and other Caribbean languages.
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice This link opens in a new window
Bringing together primary source documents from archives and libraries across the Atlantic world, this resource allows students and researchers to explore and compare unique material relating to the complex subjects of slavery, abolition and social justice.In addition to the primary source documents there are secondary sources for research and teaching; including an interactive map, scholarly essays, tutorials, a visual sources gallery, chronology and bibliography.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive This link opens in a new window
Slavery and Anti-Slavery includes documents from the United States and Europe, as well as other parts of the world. In addition to newspaper collections and books published in the antebellum era, Slavery and Anti-Slavery contains documents from several archives originally available only on microfilm.