What is a Scholarly Article?
Both scholarly and peer-reviewed articles are written by experts in academic or professional fields. Scholarly articles are published in journals for specific academic disciplines. Many scholarly journals are also peer-reviewed.
Peer-reviewed articles are submitted to reviewers who are experts in the field. Because the reviewers specialize in the same scholarly area as the author, they are considered the author’s peers (hence “peer review”).
Both scholarly and peer-reviewed articles are excellent places to find what has been studied or researched on a topic, as well as find references to additional relevant sources of information.
Databases (Multidisciplinary)
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Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Scholarly literature in the sciences, health and medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities and proceedings of international conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions. Includes cited reference searching across many databases. Search all databases in Web of Science (includes Medline and BIOSIS, direct link for on-campus users). Dates of coverage: 1965 to present.
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Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary - good for nearly all subjects. Scholarly and trade journals, popular magazines, newspapers, conference proceedings, book reviews, and more.
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JSTOR This link opens in a new windowScholarly journal archive for the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences; current issues (usually the last 2-5 years) are not digitized by JSTOR and may be obtained elsewhere.
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PubMed This link opens in a new windowPublic access to MEDLINE, the most comprehensive index for biomedical literature, plus 40+ specialized databases for biochemistry, proteins, genomics, nucleotides, the National Library of Medicine catalog, and more.
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NaturePeer-reviewed research articles of highest quality; scientific news, commentary, letters, reviews. Multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary scientific journal. Published weekly. Online access only since 2018; no access to pre-1950 articles online.
Web Resources
Google Scholar -- provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. ALSO: find out who has cited the documents you’ve already identified!