Many college-level research projects will require you to use articles from scholarly journals, collections of original, peer-reviewed research articles written by experts or researchers in a particular academic discipline. Examples are the Journal of Educational Research and the Social Psychology Quarterly. The term peer-reviewed means that other experts in the field read and evaluate the articles in the journal before it is published. You might find that some of your instructors use the terms peer-reviewed or academic to refer to scholarly articles or journals. Be sure to clarify what your instructor expects of your sources before you begin your work.

Scholarly articles focus on a specific idea or question and do not usually provide a general overview of a topic. For example, for the topic of climate change you might find scholarly articles that compare temperature data over a certain period, analyze the effect of pollution, or explore public and political conversations on the topic. Scholarly articles always include a reference list that includes other sources related to the topic; you may find those sources useful in finding other relevant articles as well.

The most popular way to find scholarly articles is to use a online database, an searchable set of information often organized by certain subject areas. Some databases are specific to one subject, like chemistry, while others include articles from many different disciplines. Many libraries have dozens, if not hundreds, of databases. It can be difficult to figure out which ones you should use, but your librarian can help you determine which databases are best for your research.

When you use a database, you can easily add filters to ensure that your results include scholarly articles only, and you can clearly see who the authors are. Your database search should result in article and journal titles, descriptions, and sometimes full articles.

While some databases are available to anyone, whether that person is a student or instructor at a college, most of the databases you’ll use for research are through subscription and available only to students at a college that pays for the service. Remember, even though databases might look just like Web sites, they’re actually carefully chosen subscriptions paid for by the library. For this reason, you will most likely need to log in with your college ID and password.

The second most popular way to find scholarly articles is to use your library’s catalog, an online resource accessible on or off campus. Sometimes off-campus access requires you to log in with your college ID and password. When searching the library catalog, you are more likely to find only the names of journals and not the titles of the articles within the journal. You might find a link to the electronic version of the journal. You may also be able to find some of the scholarly articles by using Google Scholar as your search engine. This is a specific part of Google that searches only within scholarly journal articles.