Research

Accessibility to knowledge from clinical trials, academic research, scientific journals, etc. has been warded off from the general public and neglected in K-12 education, having access limited to those with positions of wealth, power, status, and/or experience in academia. This gatekeeping of knowledge can be dangerous for the progression of evidence-based information and practices, especially pertaining to nutrition, so I encourage you to explore the literature, studies, scientific journals, etc. focusing on a subject to help better understand said subject*, of course being mindful of credibility. Although scientific findings do not need to be attached to an academic journal/academia to be valid, here is a brief credibility checklist to help when assessing legitimacy of studies apart of academia.

Credibility Checklist:

Do the author(s) have expertise related to the subject?
Are there any conflicts of interest (any biased observations, actions, decision making, or funding of study from a biased source)?
Is the study peer-reviewed?
Is the study published in a legitimate journal?
What is the journal’s impact factor (A measurement of the average amount of citations of articles in an academic journal) and does that impact factor value match the paper’s claim?
Was the study designed well (methodology, sample/group quantity, quality/health of the sample/group, and analyzation/conclusions of data found)?
Is the study consistent with other credible studies?
Does the study follow standard conventions for scientific writings?

Limited Access (certain research papers found through these search engines/databases will not be open to the general public)

National Library of Medicine is the largest medical library in the world, ran by the National Institutes of Health, and it contains millions of journals, research papers, books, and other forms of information related to health science. It’s online databases include but are not limited to: PubMed : a database of biomedical literature, PubMed Central (PMC) : a free full-access database of biomedical and life science literature, NCBI : a biomedical and genomic database, MedlinePlus : a health information database, and GenBank : an annotated database of DNA sequences.

Google scholar and google books

Elsevier sciencedirect.com mendeley embase scopus

World Wide Science

JSTOR

APA Pscycinfo

Cochrane Library

Education Resources Information Center

Refseek

Citeseerx

Bioone

microsoft academic

Science.gov

World Cat can help you find any book you need in your local libraries. Of course, it does not get you free literature, but it is great at finding the inventory at libraries near you.

Human Microbiome Project (HMP)

Open Access

Sci-Hub is a library that provides free access to research papers and books that can be priced out of the range of the general public, encouraging open access for science and learning.

Library genesis is an online database of journals, books, textbooks, and other literature collected through public sources across the internet.

USDA FoodData Central: This database can be used to find the ingredients, nutrient content, portion sizes, etc. for thousands of different foods analyzed by distinct 5 data types: USDA Global Branded Food Products Database (Branded Foods), Foundation Foods, Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies 2015-2016 (FNDDS 2015-2016), National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference Legacy Release (SR Legacy), and Experimental Foods.

Open Science Directory

Dictionary of Open Access Journals

tripdatabase

Openmd

Free Medical Journals

Base

Research Gate

ISeek

Plos One

Bioline International

Science and technology of advanced materials

Misc.

Wikipedia, the infamous free encyclopedia, usually given less credit than deserved. A great resource for introduction understanding about topics, and it can usually contain further insight on topics through its citations. That being said, just like any informational platform, a run through credibility is always needed.

Wolfram Alpha

Honorable mentions: unfortunately, for those without university credentials, these platforms require login information: Web of science, Ovid, Ebscohost, Proquest. Also, all websites listed on this page are a bulk of the research,journal,database, etc. search engines, yet there are countless more out there, check out this additional list of search engines for example.

*Nutritional Findings does not encourage piracy, copyright infringement, or reselling of any literature, scientific or other.