Finding Scholarly Secondary Sources - FYW 100 - Introduction to Academic Writing / Polansky, Ellen - James P. Adams Library at James P. Adams Library

What is a scholarly article?

Scholarly articles are written by experts in specific academic disciplines for other experts. Students frequently use information from scholarly articles in their research.

Scholars write articles to share research and ideas in their fields of study. For that reason, articles contain information that is very specific. It is best to know something about your topic before searching for articles.
Scholarly articles are generally published by academic journals.
Journals will often put articles through a peer-review process prior to publication.
The library provides access to print and digital scholarly articles. The best way to find scholarly articles on your research topic is to use an article database or Google Scholar.

Academic Article Databases - All Subjects

Academic Search Complete

Indexes and abstracts over 11,000 magazines and scholarly journals in all subject areas with over 7,000 in full text.
JSTOR

RIC currently participates in all 15 JSTOR Arts & Sciences archive collections and the Life Sciences archive collection. Journals in archive collections are always included from volume 1 number 1, and related prior titles, but stop short of current issues. RIC also subscribes to 34 current journals in JSTOR. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

Academic Article Databases - Subject Specific

Business Source Complete
Contains peer-reviewed business articles and journals, company profiles and reports, as well as case studies, industry profiles, SWOT analyses, books/monographs, magazines and trade publications, market research reports, product reviews, and country reports
ERIC

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. Provide extensive access to educational-related literature. ERIC provides coverage of journal articles, conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books and monographs.
PubMed
PubMed comprises over 22 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering.
SocINDEX with Full Text
SocINDEX offers comprehensive coverage of sociology, social work and criminology & criminal justice. Use this database to find academic resources and author profiles in: demography, ethnic & racial studies, gender studies, marriage & family, political sociology, religion, rural & urban sociology, social development, social psychology, social structure, socio-cultural anthropology, sociological history, sociological research, sociological theory, substance abuse & other addictions, violence and other topics in the social sciences. SocINDEX with Full Text contains full text for hundreds of journals dating back to 1908. This database also includes full text for books, monographs, and conference papers.