Journals Articles and Databases: An Introduction
At university, you’ll need to use scholarly information such as journal articles for your assessments. Are you new to finding journal articles? The following information will help you get started.
What are journal articles?
Journal articles are also known as peer reviewed, scholarly, academic or refereed articles. They are research papers written by experts in the field. They go through a rigorous review by other experts in the same field to check the information is good quality, unbiased and accurate.
Watch the video below to learn about the peer review process and how to identify academic articles. Want to know more? Check out the peer review guide.
Where can you find journal articles?
There are lots of places you can look but the easiest way to find academic articles is to search in the Library Databases. Library databases are collections of resources that the library subscribes to. Keep reading to learn more about the Library Databases
What is a database?
A database is an online collection of resources. Each database often focuses on a specialised area. For example, some databases may be discipline-specific such as a scientific database. Others may focus on a certain type of resource such as journal articles, videos, newspapers or images.
There isn’t one database which has everything, so it’s important to search multiple databases to find the most relevant information.
Article:
An author writes an article and submits it to a journal.
Journal:
Journals review and publish selected articles.
Database:
You can access journal articles in a database.
What are the benefits of library databases?
Click on the flipcards to discover the benefits of using library databases.
Never pay for an article!
If you are using the web or Google Scholar to search for journal articles, never pay for an article! Use the Library’s Bookmarklet Tool to access it.