I am a retired theological librarian with a specialty in research. The following resources are able to be used without cost or subscription.
Research Strategies
Many researchers expect to find resources simply by finding a list of books or articles from the database which they first use. It is better to look for a work that is close to your research topic and then look at its bibliography or footnotes. The bibliography may point to primary sources that you may need. An academic library should be providing specialized databases to fulfill the research needs of the faculty and students.
Do not be discouraged when you find a title in a language that you cannot read. It is often worth looking at the works cited for sources in a language you can read.
If you find a book as a potential source, it is good to look for book reviews of it by other scholars. The reviews should tell the strengths and weaknesses of the book. They may point to works the author should have used or titles that would better cover the topic.
Journal articles can be a good source for other publications. Keep a close eye on the footnotes and bibliography. Research libraries often provide expensive databases that provide other works that have cited an article. Google Scholar provides a form of a citation index and also a link to similar works.
General Catalogs
http://oadtl.org/ The Open Access Digital Theological Library (OADTL) is a collection of ebooks and journal articles that are available to access for free. The software used is OCLC’s WorldCat which is used by thousands of libraries around the world.
https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/ JSTOR Open provides scholars access to both Open Access books and journal articles.
Books
Theological books:
Books enter the public domain 75 years after the death of the author. In the United States in 2025, any book or journal article published or copyrighted before 1930 would be in the public domain and freely available.
http://commons.ptsem.edu/ Princeton Theological Seminary has been both digitizing and collecting theological books that are available in the public domain. A PDF copy of the titles are available to be downloaded.
http://Archive.org The internet Archive has been creating a large database of public domain books in all fields. The books may be downloaded as a PDF, epub, and several other formats.
https://www.hathitrust.org/ This digital library collection was formed originally from books that Google had digitized from their collections. Universities have continued to add to the collection over the years. There are some public domain titles that are in the collection which are not available to download.
http://books.google.com When Google started digitizing books, it was claimed that they would be freely available. They did change to offering an offprint of the books for a fee. Books that are in copyright may be searched and snippets of pages may be viewed. Older books are able to be read but no longer downloaded.
Journal Articles
https://biblicalstudies.org.uk This is a collection of theological journal articles and some books that may be accessed and often downloaded in PDF.
https://scholar.google.com/ Google Scholar is most valuable for searching for journal articles in all fields. In the settings, it possible for the user to choose a library that the searcher is affiliated with for resources. If that library has made their digital resources available, a link will appear to the full text. It has a link to provide the citation information in several formats. The citation may be downloaded to a personal bibliographic management program such as EndNote or Zotero. Most of the available programs allow the PDF of the citation to be attached to the downloaded bibliographic information. Another feature is a link to (later) works that cited this source. A work cited many times can indicate the perceived value of the article. If you like a citation, there is a link to related or similar works. Articles that are available for free will have a link where the article usually may be downloaded. Most federally funded research projects require that any articles published as a result of the funding be made Open Access or freely available. Authors who retain copyright to publications may post them to sites such as Researchgate or Academia (Link Below) where they may be accessed.
http://www.researchgate.net This is a site where authors may provide their works and make them available. A reader may join the group with a free membership. As a member, you will receive notices of the number readers viewing works that you have made available.
http://academia.edu This is a site where authors may provide their works and make them available. Academia claims to have 55 million PDFs available to download for free. For annual membership it is possible to download multiple PDFs at one time. It claims 99.3 K papers available in theology. Many works are scholarly and have been previously published. Caveat Emptor Other works are from students who have uploaded papers submitted for classes and may not be those which received an A from the professor.
http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/search.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=5&lang=en The Electronic Journals Library is an A-to-Z list of journal titles. It is best for finding known publications as it does not have typical search capabilities provided by libraries. Many titles are only available to libraries that subscribe to the database. Before each title a notation is made whether is freely available or not accessible. Some titles may have articles both freely available and restricted access. The database comes from Germany so there are many non-English titles. It lists 2,960 journal titles in “Theology and Religious Studies.”
The Ancient Roman World Maps and Travel times
https://orbis.stanford.edu/ You can answer questions about the route and time it would take to travel around the Roman world. The site gives options for land or sea travel and from walking or riding on land or different types of sea travel in various times of the year.
Theses and Dissertations
https://oatd.org/ Open Access Theses and Dissertations provides access to over seven million theses and dissertations.
https://www.bl.uk/Home.do Ethos is a database of doctoral dissertations available for free from Great Britain. It is provided by the British Library but has been down due to a cyber-attack.
https://opendissertations.org/ EBSCO Open dissertations
New Testament Resources Links
https://viceregency.com Resources for New Testament Exegesis by Roy Ciampa
Your Local Library
Your local public library is often an unused resource. The library may not have direct access to the specialized theological databases but would have general databases that include theological resources. They may be able to provide Interlibrary Loan access to books and journal articles. Today, most journal articles are provided via email with a link where the article may be downloaded in PDF.
Many seminaries provide alumni with free access to certain theological databases. Contact your alumni office.
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Gerald E. Lincoln, ThM, PhD ©2025