What is a scholarly article?
A scholarly article contains original research or experimentation by an expert in the field. Apply the following tips and guidelines to find and identify scholarly articles quickly and easily.
What do they look like?
There are several indications that an article is scholarly. Most of the following factors should be present for an article to be considered scholarly:
Adapted from Illinois Institute of Technology Reference Services Handout.
Articles are shorter works, usually between 1 and 35 pages, that are about a specific topic. Use articles to:
You will use library databases to find journal articles. Most professors will ask that you use scholarly articles. You search for articles in Databases.
The selective list of Library Databases below are an effective tools for locating scholarly articles, magazine and trade magazine articles as well as newspaper materials.
While the Databases listed below provide good coverage of many topics, if your research involves other areas, perhaps Religion, Education, Art or any number of related fields, you will find the extensive list of all Lehigh Databases at our Database Finder page
Google Scholar focuses its search on millions of "scholarly" web sites and online information sources, incorporating primarily resources on the public web, but also including some fee-based resources. You will find scholarly resources from professional and industrial organizations, academic presses, universities, public online scholarly resources (such as public online journals and databases), and sites within .edu domains. At times the full text of many resources may be freely available online thus if you are having problems locating a known item it is worth a try to search Google Scholar. The author might have made the material available on the web and Google Scholar just might include it. A concern is that it is not at all clear what is or is not included. It is still important to use judgement in evaluating the resources it may include.
You can go to Google Scholar from this link.