Scholarly and Peer Reviewed Journals
The UCSB Library subscribes to hundreds of article databases that track and record the articles that are being written in every academic field. These databases are the most reliable and efficient way to find scholarly and peer-reviewed 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, but the articles within them have not necessarily undergone a rigorous evaluation process. These journals also often carry opinion pieces, advertisements, reviews, conference proceedings, and other information relevant to the discipline.
Peer-reviewed journals (also called refereed journals) have a more focused content: they require that the articles that they publish be reviewed, evaluated, and critiqued by experts in the same subject area before being accepted for publication.These experts are the "peers," and this review process helps ensure that the final, published articles reflect solid scholarship in the field.
While not all scholarly journals are peer-reviewed, it is usually safe to assume that a peer-reviewed journal is also scholarly. Most article databases allow you to limit your search results to peer-reviewed articles.
Library Homepage
Article Databases
Finding scholarly articles in databases is a multi-step process:
1. Decide which database to use. You can browse a list of the Library's databases organized by subject, or see all databases organized alphabetically. For this assignment I recommend the 3 databases below. See the blue tabs above for search examples in each.
2. Always use the Advanced Search option.
3. Databases don't like full sentences! Build your search using a few words that best describe the main concepts of your topic. These are your "keywords."
4. Select whichever filters are appropriate (e.g.you can limit to peer-reviewed articles only) but do not click "full text" as one of the filters because this will severely limit your results.
5. If the full text of an article is not available in the database itself, use the 
link. This will take you to the article on another platform or, if we don't have access to the article online, it will offer you an option to order it through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).
4. Most article databases allow you to save, email, cite, download, or export citations or full articles.