Finding Academic Scholarly Articles

Academic literature is very important to your graduate work. You will want to limit the use of the Web, and instead increase the use of scholarly literature. Note: Wikipedia is not an acceptable source for graduate-level work.

All of your opinions should be backed-up with academic scholarly peer reviewed articles whether they be in discussions or in papers. Your textbook alone as a source is never enough.

To find this academic literature all you need to do is go to your online library. The link and instructions on how to log in are located under Course Home. I would suggest you begin with ProQuest database at the LIRN area of the online library. Within the ProQuest database you will want to be sure that you check the two boxes at the bottom of your keyword search: you want to check full text and you want to check the box for scholarly peer-reviewed work (these are academic). On the ProQuest site you’ll see a little graduation tassel to indicate this will render academic scholarly journals and literature.

ProQuest says of academic articles:

“Scholarly Journals, including peer-reviewed

A publication is considered to be scholarly if it is authored by academics for a target audience that is mainly academic, the printed format isn’t usually a glossy magazine, and it is published by a recognized society with academic goals and missions.

A publication is considered to be peer reviewed if its articles go through an official editorial process that involves review and approval by the author’s peers (people who are experts in the same subject area.) Most (but not all) scholarly publications are peer reviewed. Some trade publications are actually peer reviewed, but ProQuest does not consider them when filtering on peer reviewed. This is because getting results from trade publications instead of academic journals can be frustrating to researchers. Instead, ProQuest excludes these peer reviewed trade publications and only considers publications that are scholarly in terms of content, intent, and audience.”

Enjoy exploring the library. It is one of the great joys of academic research!