Where to Find Scholarly Sources
Some library databases and search engines have more scholarly articles than others.
Subject specific databases, like PsycInfo, Sociological Abstracts and America: History and Life have a higher concentration of scholarly articles. These databases contain many scholarly articles from the key journals in particular disciplines.
Use our lIbrary subject guides to identify subject databases. Go to library subject guides.
General databases like Academic Search Complete and OmniFile Full Text Select cover multiple displines and contain a mix of scholarly journals, newspapers, trade magazines and popular magazines. Be sure to limit your results to scholarly/peer-reviewed journals only.
Both the EBSCO and ProQuest databases use icons in their results lists to quickly identify source types.
Scholarly-Only Databases
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
Use for humanities, social sciences, science and business topics
In the databases, find and click on terms like "Peer reviewed", "Scholarly" or "Academic Journals" to save yourself a lot of time while doing your research!
Don't worry if you forget to limit to scholarly journals beforehand! You can always refine your results and pull out just the articles from peer-reviewed journals afterwards. Look for these limits along the side of the page.
Consider Google Scholar
While Google Scholar contains scholarly articles spanning multiple disciplines, not everything retrieved from it can be considered scholarly. Confused? Review what a scholarly article is and is not by clicking the Recognizing Scholarly tab.
Want Google Scholar to detect when DePaul has access to an article?
2. Click on Settings > Library Links
3. Search for DePaul; select all DePaul results