What is a scholarly article?
Scholarly articles are published in journals and undergo a process called peer review, which means they are vetted by experts prior to publication. These experts evaluate articles that are submitted to a journal, and make recommendations to the journal editors about whether or not an article should be published. Academic articles include highly specialized content and they are written assuming readers are already familiar with the research area.
The library’s Research Guides group databases by academic discipline.
Locate the Research Guide for your field, skim the database descriptions and pick 1-2 databases to search for information about your topic
Search term ideas: writing practices | discourse analysis | text analysis | genre analysis | authorship | communication practices | communication strategies | content analysis | rhetoric | language
Byeond the subject databases in your discipline, you may find articles by scholars in Linguistics, Communication, Writing Studies or Education that analyze writing practices.
The databases listed below are multidisciplinary, meaning they include citations to scholarly articles from different subject disciplines. You may find helpful citations in these tools as well.
1. Limits/Filters: To focus your search, utilize database features that allow you to specify criteria such as date and publication type, e.g. peer reviewed journals.
2. Sort Order: Note how your search results are organized – many databases sort by date (most recent articles first) rather than relevance.
3. Subject Terms/Descriptors: Pay attention to the subject terms associated with relevant articles because they can lead to other sources on your topic.
4. Get an Article: If the full article is not available, look for . Use interlibrary loan to request copies of books, articles and other items that are not available through Get it at UC.
5. Not Satisfied? If you are not finding relevant results about your topic, try different combinations of search terms, or select another search tool.