Religion and Theology - Information Competency: Where can I find academic literature?

The VU Library has many books, journals, and reference works from religious studies and theology. The library's search engine LibSearch is a good starting point for searching literature on your topic and checking whether the library has access to the sources you find there. 

Another way to search for relevant publications on your topic is through a bibliographical database. 

Some of these databases focus on a specialized academic discipline, such as the ATLA religion database and Index Theologicus. For an overview of those relevant for religious studies and theology, please check out this page. Opposed to these are general, multidisciplinary databases. The latter are good sources to explore the field, while subject databases are good for more specialized search strategies. 

Some general search engines and databases that contain literature from all academic disciplines:

• Libsearch: contains information about all (e)books, e-journals, e-articles and all other University Library materials. If a document is digitally available, you can click to obtain access to the full text.
• Web of science
• Scopus 
• Google scholar

Tip! When you are searching for literature on the web, for instance on Google Scholar or a publisher's website, you often run into a paywall. The VU Library has partnered with Lean Library to offer a free tool that supports easy access to articles, ebooks and databases for which the VU has a license or which are published open access. You can download the Lean Library browser extension here.