Essential Resources for Sixth Form

A-level Review Magazines — offer you expertise at A-level with topical articles, cutting-edge research and expert exam advice to deepen your subject knowledge and develop independent learning skills.
Subjects: Biological Sciences ● Business ● Economics ● English ● Geography ● Modern History ● Physics ● Politics ● Psychology ● Sociology

Issues Online — Issues Online has over 6,000 articles for students to use in their work. The books are available in the library and also as eBooks available online.

Financial Times — sign up for a free FT account and download the myFT app - essential reading for A-level Business and Economics, and EPQ.

JStor — is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students which provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.

Churchill Archive — Historical database with access to both the Chartwell Papers and the Churchill Papers.

Drama Online — FREE access to the National Theatre Collection

Having a library card can really support you with both reading for pleasure and research. All staff and students are eligible to join Hertfordshire Libraries for free. If you have not already done so, you can register online.

BorrowBox is a free app which provides Hertfordshire library members with access to more than 11,000 ebooks and audiobooks.

Libby offers over 370 magazines online free, including The Economist and New Scientist. Simply download the Libby App and log in with your library card number and PIN.

PressReader offers free daily newspapers and magazines from around the world including The Guardian and The Telegraph.

Online Reference Library — free access with your library card to the following online resources:

• Britannica online encyclopaedia - an edited and more authoritative source than Wikipedia

• Credo Reference for research projects

• Oxford Reference for dictionaries & bibliographies (including the Dictionary of National Biography)

• Who's Who (and Who Was Who)

• Public Information Online for all UK parliamentary papers

• UK Reference Centre - full text general reference publications, including journals.

• Ask a Librarian — submit your question and receive an answer from an experienced professional librarian

The Conversation — independent news and views from the academic and research community. With access to independent, high quality, authenticated, explanatory journalism, it will help you have a better understanding of current affairs and complex issues

Staircase 12 — excellent resource for anyone applying for Oxbridge, or Russell Group universities:
Resource Hub — lectures, podcasts & articles Reading Bank — essential book reviews
Subject guide to further reading — for Oxbridge applications

Explore the Museum of the World with the British Museum and Google

The World Factbook provides basic intelligence on the history, people, government, economy, energy, geography, environment, communications, transportation, military, terrorism, and transnational issues for 266 world entities, prepared for the US Government by the CIA.

British Library — search the main catalogue, and find free content online including e-books, e-journals, and databases from the collection.

Digital Public Library of America — discover more than 40 million images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.

ONS — the national statistical institute, responsible for collecting and publishing official statistics related to the economy, population and society.

House of Commons Library — politically impartial policy analysis and statistical research, free for all to read. Explore quick-read articles, in-depth research, and interactive data visualisations.

Google Scholar is a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature, across many disciplines and sources

Microsoft Academic is similar to Google Scholar. It covers journal titles, conference proceedings and many research topics

DOAJ — a community-curated list of open access journals which aims to be the starting point for all information searches for quality, peer-reviewed open access material

CORE — Core aggregates all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide, making them available to the public and facilitating free unrestricted access to research for all

JURN — search millions of free academic articles, chapters and theses

RSOS — monthly open journal publishing high-quality research across all of science, engineering and mathematics

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) — Open access, free academic articles. Includes science, philosophy, history, and literature

High Wire (Stanford University) — HighWire’s Intelligent Publishing Platform supports over 3000 journals, books, reference works

ScienceOpen — ScienceOpen is a freely accessible search and discovery platform that covers over 46 million Open Access articles and article records

Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) — more than 200 open access, online, peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines

Digital Commons Network — brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide, curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions

IntechOpen — the world's leading publisher of Open Access books Built by scientists, for scientists. Currently over 4300 books

EconBiz — an academic search portal for journals, working papers, and conferences in business studies and economics

Cambridge Core — includes some open access content

Oxford Academic — open access content from Oxford University Press

Sage - Open Access Journals

Wiley Open Access — authoritative peer reviewed open access journals across many research disciplines

Elsevier Open Access Journals — peer reviewed open access journals which are published by Elsevier

Project MUSE — offers open access (OA) books and journals from several distinguished university presses and scholarly societies which are freely available to libraries and users around the world

White Rose Research Online — offers shared, open access repository from the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York

ERIC — Institue of Education Science resources Information Centre. Use the options to choose "Peer reviewed only" and “Full text available on ERIC”.

Gresham College — many of these lectures are useful for A-Levels, and also for career and study decisions, for personal statements, for ‘stretch and challenge’ and for those taking the EPQ.

TED - Technology, Entertainment and Design -is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks of 18 minutes or less. TED Talks cover almost all topics — from science to business to global issues.

Hay Levels — over 200 videos on Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences featuring speakers such as Richard Dawkins, Germaine Greer, Colm Toibin, Hannah Critchlow, Jim Al Khalili and Martin Rees.

Students aged 16–25 can access even more inspiring short films from Hay Festivals by signing up to Hay Festival Compass.

Exploratorium is a public learning laboratory exploring the world through science, art, and human perception.

Future Learn — learn new skills online with world-class universities and industry experts. Develop your career, learn a new skill, or pursue your hobbies with flexible online courses.

edX - access 2500+ online courses from 140 institutions.

Coursera — try a free course today from one of 200+ world-class universities and companies

Alison — one of the world’s largest free learning platforms for education and skills training. Alison is a for-profit social enterprise dedicated to making it possible for anyone, to study anything, anywhere, at any time, for free online, at any subject level.

Open Learn — free learning from the Open University, with 1,000 free courses, interactives and videos.

OER Commons — offers a single point of access from which to search, browse, and evaluate resources in a growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality open education resources.

Dimensions — covers millions of research publications connected by more than 1 billion citations, supporting grants, datasets, clinical trials, patents and policy documents.

World Digital Library — makes available online, free of charge, multilingual primary source materials from all countries and cultures.

Math.com — is dedicated to providing revolutionary ways for students, parents, teachers, and everyone to learn math.

Open Access Theses and Dissertations — an open access repository of graduate theses and dissertations from more than 1,100 colleges, universities, and research institutions.

EBSCO Open Dissertations — a free database of more than 1.2 million electronic theses and dissertations from around the world.

EThOS — A British Library database of more than 500,000 doctoral theses

DART-Europe E-theses Portal — provides researchers with a single European Portal for the discovery of Electronic Theses and Dissertations.

Google Dataset Search — search engine that helps researchers locate online data that is freely available for use.

Kaggle — a subsidiary of Google is a platform of over 19,000 public datasets and 200,000 public notebooks.

Pew Research Center — makes its data available to the public for secondary analysis. Users need to create an account for free.

Data.gov — aims to improve public access to datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the U.S. Federal Government.

Quandl — the premier source for open, commercial, and alternative data, serving investment professionals.