Start with Multidisciplinary Databases:

• Limit to peer-reviewed or scholarly journal articles to find scholarly sources. By the way, be sure to still assess if it's a scholarly article. (For example, scholarly journals contain book reviews of scholarly texts. These are not scholarly articles.)

• To find the most relevant articles, you will need to consider many more. Try multiple keywords and search different databases.

• Focus primarily on the introduction and discussion/conclusion sections of a scholarly article. That's where they will layout where the scholarship in the field stands, what the article will set out to do, and what the authors learned.

Looking for Scholarship in a Specific Field? Try our Databases by Subject List: 

Finding Scholarly Journal Articles in Library Databases

When searching for articles in library databases, you can limit your search to only scholarly journals. The screenshots of the databases shown below outline where you can limit by source type to find the type of article you need. Remember that academic articles and scholarly articles are the same thing; different databases use the different terms but you can know that they are the same!

Limiting to academic journals in Ebsco's Academic Search Complete database

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Limiting to scholarly journals in ProQuest Combined Databases

Limiting in this database is very similar to other advanced searches in the library's databases. You can click to limit to full-text articles, to peer-reviewed articles, and you can use the built in Boolean tools (AND, OR, NOT) to change your search results and combine your simple keywords.

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Why use scholarly sources?

Scholarly articles help you to...

• Find current research
• Find data or statistics
• Find theoretical analysis