What is a scholarly article?
A Scholarly Article:
1. Is written by a scholar in the field;
2.Has been through a scholarly referee process to be evaluated by experts in the field;
3. Is aimed at a specialized audience and uses the jargon of the discipline;
4. Includes documentation in the form of notes, footnotes, and bibliography;
5.Is usually pretty long (a two-page article is not likely to be a scholarly one)
Best Databases to Find Scholarly Articles
To find scholarly articles on your topic (secondary sources), try the following databases:
Historical Abstracts
Provides access to articles on the history of the world from 1450 to the present (except the United States and Canada covered in America: History and Life).
Humanities Full-Text
Indexes and abstracts English-language articles in the most important journals in the humanities from 1984-present. Full-text available for many articles from 1995 forward.
Humanities and Social Sciences Index Retrospective
Indexes nearly 1200 scholarly journals covering the entire range of the humanities and social sciences from 1907-1984.
Project Muse
Searchable database that provides access to the full-text of journals published by many university presses in the humanities, and social sciences. Coverage varies for each title.
JSTOR
Provides full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, political science, and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Be aware that the current issues (current 2 or 3 years) are not included.
Women's Studies International
The ultimate women's studies resource! This database includes over 540,000 records drawn from a variety of essential women's studies databases.
How to Search the Databases
How to Search the Databases:
Just enter keywords describing your topic. Use the connector AND between your keywords or enter keywords in different search boxes. For example if you are interested in gender issues in British India, you could do a search like this:
You can use synonyms or related terms to describe your topics. For example, "gender or women" in the search above.
You can also use an asterisk at the end of a word to retrieve various endings. For example, colonial* would retrieve colonialism as well as colonial.
When you look at your list of results in the database, If the full-text of an article is not readily available i, click on the FIND IT AT SCU icon to see if it's available in another database or in print in the library.