Use Google Scholar to help you discover other scholarly items. You won't be able to access some of the articles, but if there's a promising title or an article you'd like to pursue further, you can check to see if we subscribe to that journal. If it's not something we have, we can try to get from another library.
Open access journals are free journals (don't require a subscription) and provide immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research. Some are peer-reviewed, some are not. Some are predatory. Make sure to evaluate any journals you might find for free online, as well as those you find through subscription-based databases.
Here are some library databases you can try to find newspaper, magazine, and journal articles. We have more through the Portal.
Multi-disciplinary database providing full text for more than 4,600 journals, including peer-reviewed full text for nearly 3,900 journals.
*Limit your results to articles that are:
-peer-reviewed
-from the last five years (unless you need research for historical purposes)
*Read the abstract, or summary, of a journal article to help you decide if it's an article you'd like to pursue.
*Look for important words the author uses in the summary for ideas for keywords. Sometimes there is also a list of keywords underneath an abstract.
Use this handout to help you figure out the parts of a journal article record. This will help you when you need to put your works cited page together.
Watch the video and read the infographic from the Undergraduate Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.