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Tips for Finding Scholarly Articles

What is an Academic or Scholarly Article?

Academic or scholarly articles are written by scholars and experts who have have studied the field about which they are writing for years.

The articles are then published in a journal that specializes in scholarship in that field. If an article has been published in a scholarly journal, the publishers of the journal are essentially vouching for the quality of the article and you can have confidence that it is credible information. Here are some characteristics of scholarly articles:

• Articles written by an expert, always signed (author's name listed)
• Credentials of author listed, such as education and position
• References and sources consulted are listed
• Frequently includes graphs, charts
• Frequently have abstracts
• Aimed at people in the field or studying the field
• Few or no ads

So How Do You Find Them?

We have many databases with academic and scholarly articles, but also many that don't. On the A-Z Databases page under the Content Type menu, you can select Academic & Scholarly to make sure you're using the right databases.

Just so your know, we have more scholarly articles in ProQuest than any other database. There's a super easy way to get just scholarly articles on your result list in ProQuest. Here's how:

1. Above the search box, select Scholarly Journals.
2. Enter your search terms in the search box and hit enter..
3. All your results will now be from scholarly journals. 

You can see easy tips for our other top scholarly databases, JSTOR and Gale, as well as an example of a scholarly article on Tips for Finding Academic & Scholarly Articles, or you can see all our Tips, designed to make your research easier.