Searching for Scholarly Articles in Library Databases

Many library databases make it easy for us to identify scholarly articles by including an option for us to filter the results to show only the scholarly articles. Of course, you can also find popular articles in the library databases. The library databases also often include a note telling us which articles are scholarly. Below are some examples.

The Highline College Library website has a One Search tool that allows you to search multiple databases at one time, whether you're on campus or at home. (From off campus, just log in with your Highline username and password when prompted.) We can type in our topic and click Go to see all the resources on this topic.

 

On the next screen, we see the filtering options in the left menu that help us narrow our results. We can click on Peer-reviewed Journals to filter out all other resources.

 

Once we apply that filter, we see only the articles that are from peer-reviewed journals (scholarly articles). Notice the active filter showing in the left menu, and also the note under each article title that says "Peer Reviewed."

 

Other library databases, such as those from ProQuest and EBSCO, also have filtering options like this. We should be sure to look for words like peer-reviewed, scholarly, or academic when we explore a new database for this feature.