Go-to research databases journalists can use to improve their reporting | Poynter.

"Scan the headlines these days and it’s evident that the world’s problems — and attendant reporting challenges — are only getting more complex. Tax policy, fracking, school reform, climate change, health care. Reporters in streamlined newsrooms must increasingly tackle topics about which they may know little initially. And a quick review of news archives — the proverbial 'pulling the clips' — may not be sufficient to capture the latest understanding of these hugely complex subjects. At the same time, however, the available in-depth knowledge tools for reporters are growing. The world of scholarship is creeping toward greater openness, and many academics are putting their research online in pre-publication form. Many journals are making select studies available for free; even paid repositories such as JSTOR are making more of their offerings open access. This means more research to draw on and more expert sources to discover easily and quickly. Until relatively recently, online academic paywalls were ubiquitous — and the research world was not yet even fully online. Taking a second look now in this new, evolving era of digital access can be rewarding. For media members, getting to know this world a little better can lead to efficiencies, putting useful data and analysis at your fingertips that can, among other things, beef up context grafs and generate further angles. It’s also important to acknowledge that conventional Web searches — just Googling it — won’t necessarily turn up the best research materials; search algorithms don’t always prominently highlight studies and reports that are seldom linked to or visited. There’s also the problem of increasing “personalization” of search results. For specialist reporters, many of the key subject-area databases may be well-known. But for more general assignment reporters, here is a short, representative list of open databases and scholarly search engines that are well worth bookmarking — and entering your key words into as part of the newsgathering process... "