abstract: research purpose: the purpose of this research is to identify academic databases assessment factors and criteria at law and political science majors. the necessity of this research is to distinguish academic databases assessment factors and criteria and to identify the most important ones and rank them in order to select an appropriate database according to students’ and faculty members’viewpoints and to represent appropriate related solutions. the research advantages include: database purchasers will be able to become aware of the criteria considered by law and political science post graduate students and professors and then purchase a database accordingly. on the other way, publishers will be able to produce their productions based on users’ expectations according to the mentioned criteria. users also will be able to determine the best databases according to the mentioned criteria and the results resulted from the 6 databases: sage, ebsco, jstor, proquest, elsiveir, and heinonline and so get to the desired results of their search faster. research method: the research methods are divided into twoquantitative and qualitative methods. regarding the research purpose, the present research method is quantitative. the research method used at literature review section is library study and at data analysis section is descriptive-analytic survey study. the present research population includes two groups: post graduate students studying in law and political science majors at tehran university (200 persons) and law and political science faculty members at tehran university (80 persons). classified random sampling techniques have been used for sampling and the questionnaire tool has been used for data gathering according to the existing variables. results: according to the research results, post graduate students’ and professors’ viewpoints about each factor was assessed which the most important factor from the professors’ viewpoint was firstly comprehension and then searching characteristics and on the other hand from the post graduate students viewpoint it was firstly searching characteristics and then comprehension. the most important characteristics were assessed according to the highest means which are represented at the following: relevance between search results and the desired subject, databases subject comprehension, searching based on the title, searching based on the keyword, searching based on the subject, searching based on the author, the level of legibility (font type, line spacing, using of illustration and figures for better understanding, …), impact of the text format and shape on improving of the legibility (background, heading, …), and the validity of the represented information. the results also showed that there is at least one and at some cases 4 significant difference between students’ and professors’ viewpoints about databases assessment factors except than jstor database. there is no significant difference between students’ and professors’ viewpoints about jstor databases assessment factors. keywords: database, law and political science students at tehran university, law and political science professors at tehran university, assessment criteria, assessment factors