Find articles
To find articles within journals, use Indexes and Databases. These are the best ones to start with:
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PubMed This link opens in a new window
Citations and abstracts for millions of articles in medicine, life science, and health administration. Includes full contents of MEDLINE, plus "in process" citations for recent articles, and some additional references from life sciences journals.
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Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Covers thousands of research journals, and extensive collections of conference proceedings and books across hundreds of disciplines.
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BIOSIS Citation Index This link opens in a new window
Contains citations to items in journals, books, conference proceedings, and technical reports, in all areas of the life sciences and biology. Many citations include abstracts.
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Aquatic Sciences & Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) This link opens in a new window
Covers all aspects of aquatic science including aquaculture, biology, conservation, environmental quality, fisheries, freshwater environments, limnology, marine biotechnology, marine environments, meteorology, oceanography, policy and legislation, and wildlife management.
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Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
If you do not see a .pdf link to a journal article, look for the 
button. We might still have access to the article. Use this same button to request an article from elsewhere if UCSB does not subscribe to it.
Find subject-based databases
Select "Article Indexes and Research Databases" to find databases by subject. Use a database or two that is most recommended in that subject.
Find Protocols
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Current Protocols This link opens in a new window
Collection of standard research methods in the biosciences. They include: step-by-step protocols with annotations that alert you to special considerations, tips, and optional procedures; alternate and support protocols to accommodate different equipment and desired results; materials lists for each protocol; detailed recipes for reagents, solutions, and culture media; expert commentaries with troubleshooting instructions, and planning considerations; tables and figures to clarify complex procedures; and appendices filled with useful reference material.
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Nature ProtocolsPublished since 2006, "the content includes both classical methods and cutting-edge techniques relevant to the study of biological problems."
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Protocols.ioAn open access repository of protocols.
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Springer Nature Experiments This link opens in a new window
Electronic database of reproducible laboratory protocols in the Life and Biomedical Sciences. Connects researchers with relevant and important protocols and methods to support their research projects. Includes content from Nature Methods, Nature Protocols, SpringerProtocols and Protocols Exchange. NOTE: UCSB does not have full text access to all protocols indexed in this database.
Is it Peer Reviewed?
Many of the journals indexed in specialized databases are scholarly but those databases do not tell you whether a journal is peer reviewed or not.
To find out if a journal is peer reviewed look at the submission process on their website for authors.
You can also ask a reference librarian.
Scholarly and Academic Journal Articles
Scholarly journals (also called academic journals) contain articles written by, and addressed to, experts in a discipline. Scholarly journals present the research of experts in a field, although these journals also often carry opinion pieces or even advertisements unique to the field addressed by the journal. Publication cycles vary for scholarly journals, ranging from yearly to monthly but most frequently they are published bimonthly (every other month) or quarterly.
Peer-reviewed journals (also called refereed or juried journals) send submitted articles to one or more experts for review before deciding to publish them. This review process helps ensure that published articles reflect solid scholarship in a field. Most often, the experts reviewing an article make critical comments on the text, comments that the author must incorporate into the article before its publication.
While not all scholarly journals are peer-reviewed, it is usually safe to assume that a peer-reviewed journal is also scholarly.
Have a citation?
Tables, Graphs & Images
Look for the HTML version of an article to download these items as it's difficult to extract a high quality image from a pdf file. Be sure to cite where your images come from!