Academic Journals: Welcome

This guide provides an overview of academic journal articles, the peer review process, and open access journals for new users of the UCSB Library. If you would like further information, please use the Ask a Librarian service.

An academic journal—sometimes called a scholarly journal—is a specific type of publication created to share academic research and scholarship. Just as a magazine contains articles written by different people, an academic journal also contains separate articles written by various scholars in the field. This is one way that scholars communicate with each other to share their research. 

If you are searching for a scholarly article relevant to your research topic, we recommend that you start with UC Library Search, which will retrieve the library's online and physical sources in one simple search. You can type in a keyword, title, subject heading, or author name to begin searching directly from the library's homepage.  Once you have a list of results, you can refine your results on the left by selecting "Articles" under Resource Type or "Peer-reviewed Journals" under Show Only.

You can find additional sources by searching in specific databases. The library subscribes to hundreds of database collections. Most of these cover a specific subject, such as Economics, Feminist Studies, or Biology. You can find a list of our databases using the Articles & Databases link on the UCSB Library homepage.

If you are logged into your UCSB email account, you can also search on Google Scholar and use the "Get it at UC" function as you look at your results to find full-text articles through the UCSB Library.

If you know the journal title you are looking for, you can go to the library homepage and select "Journal Search" from the drop-down Research menu at the top. Insert your journal title to find both print and online journals. Online journals can be accessed using "Online Access" links. 

Some academic journal articles go through a peer review process. This is where experts in a field of study review articles before they are published to ensure that the research is held to the discipline's rigorous standards. The significance of this process is that these experts (or peers) have read and approved the research as a useful contribution to the academic discipline. Note that even after going through the peer review process, there is no guarantee that an article will be published in an academic journal nor that it will have long-term significance in a discipline.

Watch "Peer Review in 3 Minutes" (3:15 min) to learn more.

Transcript of the video.

More information about this video.

Open Access (OA) is a newer form of scholarly publishing. It refers to scholarly research that is freely and immediately available online. One of the many values of OA is that it removes financial barriers to accessing scholarly research. OA scholarly literature often has less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works for users and authors. If you have questions about publishing through open access, please read our open access guide or contact the library at openaccess@library.ucsb.edu.

You can find OA articles using UC Library Search and in many of UCSB Library's databases. You can also find OA articles on the open web through sites like the Directory of Open Access Journals.