Top Databases for Scholarly Articles
Scholarly articles are written by authorities in a field, usually faculty members at a college or university.
The database you use to find scholarly articles will depend on the subject you are researching. Below are some good examples of databases. Web of Science and Google Scholar cover multiple disciplines, while Sociological Abstracts covers journals in sociology and related social science fields.
- Web of ScienceChoosing "All Databases" allows you to search an index of journal articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and other resources in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
- Socological AbstractsCovers literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences.
- Google ScholarGoogle Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.--About Google scholar.
- JSTORJSTOR is a fully-searchable database containing the back issues of several hundred scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics, music, ecology and botany, business, and other fields. It includes the following collections: Arts & sciences I, II and III, General science, Ecology and botany, Business, Language and literature.
Scholarly vs. Popular articles
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Distinguishing Scholarly Journals from Other Periodicals​ shows how to evaluate periodicals by looking at their format, intended audience, and appearance.
Finding Full-Text of Articles
You want the full text of articles, right? There are several ways to find them.
- Use the Get it! Cornell links wherever you see them!
- If you have citations for specific articles: check the Library Catalog to see if we subscribe to the journals that contain the articles. Do a Journal Title search (or a Journal Title Abbreviation search if you're not sure of the full title). The Catalog will show whether or not we have access to the electronic version and/or the print version.
- If we don't have it, we can get it for you in a few days! Request articles via Interlibrary Loan.
In any event, Reference librarians are here to help you - so please contact us with any questions!