Locating Scholarly Sources
Not sure where to find a scholarly article? Try the main search box on the library's homepage! This search box allows you to search almost all of our databases, news subscriptions, and more. It captures more than just scholarly articles, so you can find your popular sources here, too. To find your scholarly articles in this search, enter the keywords for your topic in the main search box, hit search, and then you can dive deeper into the Scholarly Articles section of your search results.
Need further help? Check out our guide on Using the Library Search for tutorials and tips.
How do you know that you're looking at a scholarly article? One way is by looking at the filters in your results. When you search for your topic in the main search box and then click 'See All Results' under the Scholarly Articles category, you'll notice that a few filters are automatically turned on in your search results.
These filters narrow down your results to only articles that are available as full-text (meaning you can read the entire article and not just the abstract) and appear in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. Note that not everything in a scholarly journal is peer-reviewed. Letters to the editor, book reviews, and other types of writing also appear in those journals and are not peer-reviewed. If you're unsure if what you're looking at is a peer-reviewed article, review the tutorial in the 'What is a Scholarly Article' box on this page to learn about the components!
What is a Scholarly Source?
To complete academic-level research, you will often need academic-level sources! Some of those sources include scholarly articles, but what exactly are those? You can identify scholarly articles by remembering the acronym I'M RAD. Watch the video below to learn more.
Evaluating & Understanding Scholarly Articles
In Module 2, we discussed how to evaluate any information you find online. The same also applies to evaluating scholarly information! As you're reading an article, you'll want to consider if this source is "good" for what you need. Is it relevant to your research question, or just sort of related? Does it provide valuable insight or help answer your question? Was it published recently enough for what you need? Is this author the best expert on this topic? These are all questions you might ask yourself as you consider whether to use a peer-reviewed journal article in your project.
However, none of this matters if you can't understand what you're reading! Scholarly articles are often dense, use complicated statistical analyses, and are heavy on disciplinary language that you may not be familiar with yet. That's okay! No one is an expert on a topic when they first start exploring it. As you're searching, you should feel empowered to move on from an article if it feels too overwhelming to understand most of it. If there are only a few barriers to understanding the article, though, use the background information resources we explored in Module 1 to look up unfamiliar terms or concepts and build your knowledge on the topic! In addition, you can use the link below to explore more on how to reading and take notes on a scholarly article effectively. Whenever you're in doubt, always know you can ask a librarian for advice!