Scholarly v. Popular
- Anatomy of a Scholarly ArticleInteractive display of the key elements of a scholarly journal article.
- Here is a short video explaining PEER REVIEW.
Los Angeles Public Library
Not all articles are available in databases that UCLA subscribes to. The Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) has over 250 databases available to anyone with an LAPL library card. You can get an ECARD online-no need to go to a library.
The most useful database to try searching is Research Library (ProQuest), which UCLA does not subscribe to. It has some online journals not at UCLA.
Find Articles
These are general databases that are useful for lower-division research papers. They contain articles in scholarly journals, newspapers, and popular publications. If you want to look for others, go to this page to browse databases by subject. Click through to your discipline (political science, sociology, history, etc.). Here you will find a selection of the most useful databases for each discipline listed.
is your link to full-text! Note that some sources only index journal articles—they don't actually have the full text.
- Use the button to find the full text or search for the journal title in the UCLA Library Catalog.
- Request the article through interlibrary loan if UCLA does not own the full text.
For more tips, see our guide on database searching.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
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This is a large database with a user-friendly interface that contains scholarly and popular articles on many different subjects. It's a great place to start basic research. Click on the "Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Journals" box on the front page to limit your search to scholarly articles. - Web of Science This link opens in a new window
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A multidisciplinary database, with searchable author abstracts, covering the journal literature of most disciplines. Indexes major journals with all cited references captured. Combines the following citation databases: Science Citation Index Expanded; Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI); Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI); Conference Proceedings Citation Index.
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new window
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Abstracts and citations to journal articles, books, book chapters, conference proceedings, and dissertations relevant to students, researchers, and professionals working in the psychological, social, behavioral, and health sciences.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Full text of core scholarly journals from their beginning to approximately five years ago. Disciplines include botany, business, ecology, general science, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, statistics. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to selected JSTOR e-books.
- Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
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Full text of current issues (from about 1990) of scholarly journals published by university presses, chiefly in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to Muse e-books published from 2017-present, plus a selected number of other e-book titles.
- Google ScholarGoogle Scholar is another option to find scholarly articles. Click on the UC-eLinks link opposite your search results to access the content full-text through the library. If you don't see UC-eLinks in your results, click on Settings, then Library Links and select University of California, Los Angeles as your institution. Then input your search terms. You can limit the date range on the left to get fewer, more recent results.
The databases listed below are for newspapers. For more news sources, see the News research guide.
- U.S. Major Dailies This link opens in a new window
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Contains full-text dating back to the 1980s for five of the nation’s major newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal.
- Access World News — Historical and Current This link opens in a new window
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Full-text articles from over 4,756 US and international blogs, journals, newspapers, newswires, videos, and web sources. Date coverage varies with individual newspapers. Formerly called America's Newspapers or NewsBank. - Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
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Full-text news (including broadcast transcripts), business, legal, and reference information. Useful for finding full-text of current performing arts and media industry news in major newspapers. Includes biographical information from Who's Who titles. Formerly LexisNexis Academic.
Using Subject Terms
Many databases will assign subject terms to each article. These subject terms are like tags: if you click on one, then the database will search for all articles tagged with that term. This can be helpful if a subject term is slightly different than your keywords. For example, a keyword search for "urban gardens" leads to an article tagged with these terms:
Clicking on "URBAN agriculture" leads to a whole different set of articles, and clicking on "GARDENS" will broaden the search from community gardens to gardening in general.
Note, though, that you'll want to start with a good keyword to find your first set of articles. For more on choosing keywords, see our video tutorial!