Academic Search Complete – This is a very comprehensive, multidisciplinary database that allows you to search across many subject areas including business, social sciences, humanities, general science, arts, and literature. It contains articles, reports, and journals. Some key features include indexing and abstracts for over 9,000 journals, with full text for more than 8,500 of those titles dating back to 1975.
Business Source Complete – As the name suggests, this database is focused specifically on business and management-related sources. It contains articles covering many facets of business including marketing, management, economics, finance, accounting, international business, and more. Like Academic Search Complete, it provides indexing and abstracts for around 11,000 journals with full text for nearly 10,000 of those titles dating back to 1886.
CINAHL – For projects related to nursing, allied health, or medicine, CINAHL is one of the top databases to search. It stands for Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature. It provides abstracts and indexing for over 3,300 journals focused on nursing and health. The full-text holdings date back to 1981.
EBSCO MegaFILE – This is another comprehensive database encompassing general subjects like business, health, education, psychology, and more. It currently indexes and abstracts over 3,400 publication titles with some full text availability dating back to 1970. MegaFILE draws content from many EBSCO databases which allows you to search across disciplines in a single search.
JSTOR – For projects in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, JSTOR is an excellent option. It provides digitized access to over 2,000 academic journals and 125,000 ebooks across many subject areas like history, area studies, economics, law, philosophy, and religion. Full text is available for the complete runs of most titles since their first issue.
Project MUSE – Similar to JSTOR, Project MUSE has a large collection of digitized humanities and social sciences content but focuses more on titles from university presses. It provides access to over 700 scholarly journals, 800 ebooks, and multiple primary source collections. Full runs of most journal titles are available.
PsycINFO – If your capstone project is related to psychology, this database from the American Psychological Association is one of the most important to search. It indexes and abstracts over 3,500 journals, books, and dissertations covering topics in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and many related social and behavioral sciences. Dating back to 1806, it is a very comprehensive resource.
SAGE Research Methods and SAGE Journals – For projects involving methodology aspects or studying within specific disciplines, these databases from SAGE Publishing are excellent options to explore. SAGE Research Methods covers both quantitative and qualitative research techniques and methodologies. SAGE Journals provides full text access to over 1,000 journals across the social sciences.
ScienceDirect – As the name implies, ScienceDirect is ideal for projects involving scientific, technical, or medical subjects. It provides full text access to over 3,500 scientific, technical, and medical journals published by Elsevier. Indexing and abstracts are available for most titles dating back to 1995. Key subjects include life sciences, physics, chemistry, engineering, and more.
Social Sciences Citation Index – For identifying works that have been cited in other publications and gaining a better sense of the topics that are most influential within specific subject domains, the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is extremely valuable. It covers over 3,400 journals across more than 50 social sciences disciplines and records all cited references found within those publications since its launch in 1956.
In addition to searching these types of academic databases, it’s also important to explore other potential sources of information relevant to your capstone topic like government documents, reports from professional associations, statistics, dissertations, and white papers. Talking to subject librarians at your institution can help uncover additional specialized databases or unique resources to examine as well. The references and works cited pages from key papers and publications on your topic may also point you towards foundational or influential sources. The more thoroughly you research from multiple angles, the stronger your capstone thesis and analysis will be. Let me know if any part of this response needs further explanation or elaboration.