Select "by Subject" to find databases. Use a database that is most recommended in that subject, listed near the top of the options.
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 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.
After reviewing the article results in UCSB Library Search, turn to specialized databases like these to find more:
Scholarly, multi-disciplinary database covering thousands of journals and other publications. Includes full-text access to peer-reviewed journals, and indexing/abstracts for magazines, monographs, reports, and conference proceedings.
Full-text research database for communication studies. Offers hundreds of top communication journals, magazines and other sources covering all related disciplines, including media studies, linguistics, speech pathology, rhetoric and discourse.
Combines Communication and Mass Media Complete and Communication Abstracts
Covers all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and more.
Offers deep coverage in applicable areas of agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, natural resources, marine & freshwater science, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, urban planning, and more.
Formerly known as Environmental Issues & Policy Index and Environmental Knowledgebase
Includes abstracts and citations from over 4,000 journals and other sources including conference proceedings, reports, monographs, books, and government publications.
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.
Covers a wide range of water issues, including irrigation, hydropower, riparian rights, water conservation, drinking water quality, and tribal water rights, encompassing the unique water rights issues that span from the Eastern seaboard to the Great Lakes and across the arid West. Includes congressional documents, books, legislative histories on major legislation, and Supreme Court briefs on related cases.
Provides access to news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis. Includes 3 primary collections: 1) full-text news sources (U.S. and international) 2) aggregated economic data on businesses, corporations, and industries in the U.S. and abroad; 3) full-text legal documents - U.S. Federal and State court cases, and law reviews.
Searchable and displayable full text of the Los Angeles Times from 1985 to the present. (Note: historical backfiles of the LA Times are available separately for 1881-1984.)
Scholarly, multi-disciplinary database covering thousands of journals and other publications. Includes full-text access to peer-reviewed journals, and indexing/abstracts for magazines, monographs, reports, and conference proceedings.
This interdisciplinary collection of multimedia materials brings together primary source documents, archives, films, text and photographs to support the study of key environmental challenges and events from the 20th and 21st centuries, including climate change, water/air pollution, biodiversity, conservation, agriculture, deforestation and more.
Policy Commons is a one-stop community platform for objective, fact-based research with more than 25 million pages of curated, high quality policy reports, briefs, analyses, working papers, and datasets from the world’s leading policy experts, nonpartisan think tanks, IGOs and NGOs.