Identifying Scholarly Journals

Video Transcript: 

Welcome to Research minutes, 90 seconds of research tips for you, the busy student from us, the librarians. In this research minute, we're looking at how to recognize and find scholarly articles.

Student: "I have to find scholarly articles for my research paper. I don't know where to start."

Librarian: "To identify scholarly articles, sometimes called peer-reviewed articles in scholarly or research journals look for these characteristics: an abstract: a one-paragraph summary of the article at the beginning, the author affiliations: where the authors work - usually listed at the bottom of the first page, look for the use of specialized vocabulary or in some fields the presence of graphs or statistical tables, finally, a bibliography: a list of citations to articles and books at the end of the article.”

Student: “Okay I get it. So where can I find these articles?”

Librarian: “Choosing the right database to search for scholarly articles is key. Like the MLA bibliography for language and literature, there are hundreds of these databases. Ask a reference librarian to suggest the right database for your paper. Some databases, like ProQuest or EBSCO have a peer-reviewed checkbox to limit your search to scholarly or research articles. Articles in popular magazines and newspapers are not scholarly sources."

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