Finding Scholarly Journal Articles
"My professor says I need three scholarly articles for my paper. How do I find them? And how do I know if they're scholarly?"
FRANCIS will tell you what journals we own, but it won't tell you what articles are in those journals. You could go to the stacks and page through issue after issue, but wouldn't it be great if someone had indexed those journals for you?
Well, you're in luck. The library subscribes to hundreds of discipline-specific indexes and databases, which catalog the articles published in thousands of scholarly journals, magazines, and other periodicals. Some of them include the full text of articles, others will just give you citations.
Choosing the right index is hard, so we've organized them by subject for you. Different databases cover different journals, so don't stop with just one - try searches in a bunch of databases to see what you get.
When you find an article you want, be sure to gather the entire citation (author, title, journal, volume, issue, and page number). You'll need this for citing your sources later. Most of our databases have a find text button that will lead you through the process of finding the full text of the article. If the find text button isn't there, you can put the citation into the citation linker to start the process of getting the article.
Searching for scholarly articles and retrieving them is one of the hardest parts of scholarly research - even professors come to us with questions on a regular basis. So don't hesitate to ask a librarian for assistance if you get stuck.
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