How to find "scholarly" articles online that don't have to be paid for? (Medieval British Isles)

by KoreaWithKids

My daughter (who is on the autism spectrum but mainstreamed) has to find a scholarly article online that "address[es] the process of ascension in medieval British Isles."   (This is for the unit on Macbeth, but I don't think the article is supposed to be about Macbeth specifically). It can't be wikipedia or a "generic encyclopedia site." (Which I assume includes things like britannica.com, though perhaps I should clarify that with the teacher.) The teacher said it should be "the free internet," which I think lets out things like JSTOR. We've been trying to find a good article and just striking out. (The teacher said to google things like "Who set the rules for how a person got to be king? Who enforced the rules? What happens when the rules were broken? How often were the rules broken?" which is obviously not helpful as far as actual googling goes.) Does anyone have any suggestions on where to look?

Iguana_on_a_stick

JSTOR has "free read online access" of up to 100 articles per month. They vastly expanded it during COVID. That seems pretty free to me. And it's one of the best providers out there for finding scholarly articles online, so I definitely wouldn't rule that out.

Regarding the suggested questions it seems to me that what is actually being referred to is the concept of "legitimacy" and "succession." I suspect that using keywords like that will yield much better results when searching, even if you just use google.

Cixila

Have a look at tools such as google scholar and academia.edu. While not as exhaustive as JSTOR or some of the Oxford or Cambridge collections, they do have plenty of academic papers and articles to work with. I don't know if JSTOR runs free articles (I doubt it, but hey), then you can always just excuse it with that.

Bare in mind that not everything on scholar and academia is necessarily free through them, but some things are, they often give you abstracts and some notes regardless of price/lack thereof, and scholar at least also gives you the doi-code, so you can paste that into a search engine and maybe find it free on other sites (I don't mean pirating, some sites are just well hidden)

Iphikrates

Hi - we as mods have approved this thread, because while this is a homework question, it is asking for clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself, which is fine according to our rules. This policy is further explained in this Rules Roundtable thread and this META Thread.

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Additionally, while users may be able to help you out with specifics relating to your question, we also have plenty of information on /r/AskHistorians on how to find and understand good sources in general. For instance, please check out our six-part series, "Finding and Understanding Sources", which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay.