Scholarly Articles
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 UC Davis Library subscribes to hundreds of databases. The databases listed below are multidisciplinary, meaning they include citations to scholarly articles from different subject disciplines.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowAcademic Search Complete is a multidisciplinary database broadly covering newspapers, magazines and journals in the arts, humanities, social sciences, sciences and technology.
[Coverage: 1887-present] - Project Muse: Scholarly Journals Online This link opens in a new window
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Project Muse provides full text access to hundreds of journals in the arts, humanities, social sciences and mathematics. It is useful for searching interdisciplinary cultural studies topics. Its full-text search engine permits finer-grained searching than any other index for these journals. Coverage varies by journal. - Scopus This link opens in a new window
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Large interdisciplinary abstract and citation database to academic journal literature, conference proceedings and books with broad coverage across the sciences and social sciences, includes citation tracking tools (Citescore).
[Coverage: full coverage from 1996-present, with selected coverage as far back as 1823] - Web of Science Core Collection This link opens in a new windowWeb of Science Core Collection enables searching of top-cited peer-reviewed content across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities with "cited reference" search capabilities. "It is a curated collection of over 20,000 peer-reviewed, high-quality scholarly journals published worldwide (including Open Access journals) in over 250 science, social sciences, and humanities disciplines. Conference proceedings and book data are also available." There is also access to Journal Citation Reports which provide impact metrics like the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Eigenfactor Scoring. Web of Science also has article, author and institutional citation indices. Includes EndNote Basic online citation management tool.
[Coverage: 1900-present]
These subject-focused databases are important tools for researchers in the health sciences and psychology.
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new window
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APA PsycInfo is published by the American Psychological Associations and provides comprehensive indexing and abstracts of the international psychological literature from the 1800s to the present. Documents indexed include journals, articles, books, dissertations and more. 90% of the 3,000+ titles indexed in APA PsycInfo are peer-reviewed.
[Coverage: 1840-present] - PubMed for UC Davis This link opens in a new windowPubMed for UC Davis offers users vastly more full-text articles than does the public version of Pubmed.gov. Search results in the UCD version display "Get it at UC" buttons providing (with on-campus or VPN connection) access to articles in journals licensed by UC Davis or enabling patrons to request articles that are not immediately available online. PubMed comprises over 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources. PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
[Coverage: 1902-present]
Research Guides by Subject
The library’s Research Guides group databases by academic discipline.
Instructions: Locate the Research Guide for your field, skim the database descriptions and pick 1-2 databases to search for information about your topic.
⇒Example
Research Topic: Sustainable materials in fashion design
Library Research Guide: Fashion and Costume
Databases: Design and Applied Arts Index, Berg Fashion Library
Search Tips
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.